NEWS
February 15, 2009
ALISON DES FORGES, 66 Scholar chronicled Rwanda's genocide Alison Des Forges, a human rights activist who drew the world's attention to the killings of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Rwanda in the 1990s and chronicled the massacre, died Feb. 12 in the crash of a Continental Airlines passenger plane in Clarence Center, N.Y., near Buffalo. After April 6, 1994, when an airplane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down, members of the politically dominant Hutu group suddenly began to attack the Tutsi minority in an uncontrolled rampage of violence.
NEWS
By Edmund Sanders | December 19, 2008
NAIROBI, Kenya - The ringleader of the 1994 Rwanda genocide was sentenced yesterday to life in prison for his role in the early days of an ethnic slaughter that eventually killed an estimated 800,000 people. Theoneste Bagosora, 67, was the highest-ranking military officer convicted at the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The former colonel's prosecution was viewed as a significant step in efforts to punish war crimes. "This victory sends a message to people like the warlords in Darfur or those committing horrendous rapes and killing in Congo," said Barbara Mulvaney, a Southern California attorney who served as chief prosecutor.
NEWS
By Michael Hoffman | June 16, 2005
Yves Twagirayezu stood next to his 17-year-old brother and watched the Hutu soldiers behead him and throw him into a 30-foot-deep mass grave. The 11-year-old Tutsi boy knew he was next. He squirmed from the clutches of a Hutu soldier to jump in after his brother, followed by two other Tutsi boys standing at the rim of the pit. The Hutu soldiers, ordered not to waste bullets on the young prisoners, shoveled on dirt and rocks, figuring they would bury the boys alive. "I got scared and broke loose," Twagirayezu said.
NEWS
By David Zurawik | March 19, 2005
How do you tell the story of 800,000 deaths in 100 days without making a movie too horrific to bear? That is the challenge director Raoul Peck faced in making the HBO film Sometimes in April, which chronicles the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994 as hard-line members of the Hutu majority slaughtered Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The blood bath lasted more than three months while the world looked on but offered little help. Peck, who scored a triumph with HBO's Lumumba in 2002, masterfully combines a visual style of harsh realism to communicate the horror, with an elegiac tone and poetic sensibility that seeks to redeem it. The result is an epic that stirs the soul with its story of the dignity and suffering of those who survived, even as it staggers the imagination with the catalog of brutality that they witnessed.
NEWS
By Michael Sragow | January 14, 2005
It's not who you know or what you know or even how you use it, but whether you're willing to test it in a matter of life or death. That's the ultimate challenge for most people, yet the daily challenge for the hero of Hotel Rwanda, Terry George's enraging and enthralling fact-based movie about the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), who manages a four-star Kigali hotel, understands everyone and everything about his country except its capacity for evil. When he can't escape that evil he combats it with rationality.
NEWS
By Michael Sragow | January 9, 2005
Don Cheadle has been such a consummate chameleon that audiences may not recall how many times they've seen him. When they do see him, they may register his presence with a puzzled, then delighted double take. On TV in the mid-1990s, the now-40-year-old actor made his biggest splash as a comically earnest district attorney on David E. Kelley's quirky dramedy Picket Fences. In movies, he first generated worldwide buzz as Denzel Washington's homicidally jumpy friend, Mouse, in 1995's Devil in a Blue Dress -- a man so hard-wired with violence he could declare, with a straight face, "If you didn't want me to kill him, why did you leave me alone in a room with him?"
NEWS
April 11, 2004
"The international community failed Rwanda, and that must leave us always with a sense of bitter regret and abiding sorrow." U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan Ten years ago last week the most rapid genocide in recorded modern history began in Rwanda, an obscure Central Africa state about the size of Maryland. In about 100 days, an estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and their Hutu supporters were slaughtered, most often hacked to death by machete. While this massacre took place, the United States, the United Nations and most Europe did nothing to prevent or to stop the slaughter.
NEWS
By NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE | August 24, 2003
KIGALI, Rwanda - President Paul Kagame raised his fist at a rally the other day, and the thousands of people gathered around him, ethnic Hutu and Tutsi alike, did the same. "Oye!" the president yelled. "Oye!" the people responded. With days to go before the first presidential election since the mass killings in Rwanda in 1994, Kagame clearly has the crowds on his side. They wear his T-shirts and caps and wave tiny flags that his campaign puts into their hands. When he cheers, they cheer along with him. But many question whether the campaign leading up to the election tomorrow has been truly democratic.
NEWS
By KNIGHT RIDDER/TRIBUNE | February 20, 2003
NAIROBI, Kenya - A United Nations war crimes tribunal convicted a Rwandan pastor yesterday who fled to Texas and his son of genocide for orchestrating the 1994 slaughter of hundreds of ethnic Tutsis who had sought refuge in the minister's church compound. The Rev. Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, 78, former pastor of a Seventh-day Adventist complex, is the first church leader that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has convicted. The judicial body was created in 1994 to try those suspected of ordering extremist ethnic Hutu militias to massacre 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and Hutus who refused to go along with the extremists.
NEWS
By LOS ANGELES TIMES | November 1, 2001
NAIROBI, Kenya - Beset by eight years of ethnic violence, Burundians attempt to write a new chapter in their bloody history today by ushering in a government that will eventually transfer power to the Hutu majority. During the past week, 700 South African soldiers have massed in Bujumbura, the capital of this central African nation, to protect about 150 political exiles returning to participate in a three-year transition to democracy. Former South African President Nelson Mandela brokered an agreement on the transitional government, and he will be joined by several other African leaders today in launching it. Current President Pierre Buyoya, an ethnic Tutsi, will serve as Burundi's leader for the next 18 months.