Four memorials commemorating the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, during which at least 800,000 people were murdered, joined Unesco’s World Heritage list on Wednesday, the UN organisation announced.
“New inscription on Unesco’s World Heritage List. Genocide memorial sites: Nyamata, Murambi, Gisozi and Bisesero,” Unesco said on X (ex-Twitter).
The four sites commemorate the massacres perpretrated in Rwanda for around a hundred days, from April to July 1994, and targeting members of the Tutsi ethnic group and moderate Hutus.
Located on Gisozi Hill a few kilometres from the centre of the capital, Kigali, the Genocide Memorial, built in 1999 and inaugurated in 2004, is the main one of some 200 places of remembrance dotted around “the country 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 the surrounding area.
In the museum tracing the history of Rwanda, visitors are confronted in particular with display cases showing skulls, bone fragments, torn clothing, images of piled-up corpses, portraits of the victims and weapons – machetes, clubs, rifles – used by the genocidaires.
The other UNESCO-listed sites were the scene of some of the bloodiest killings of the genocide.
At Nyamata, some 40 kilometres south of Kigali, 50,000 people who had sought refuge in a church were massacred in one day. The building has been transformed “into a memorial representative of other churches in which victims of the genocide died,” UNESCO says on its website.
On Murambi hill, about 150 kms south-west of Kigali, the local authorities and the former Rwandan armed forces had called on the Tutsi population, in April 1994, to gather in a technical school complex under construction on the pretext of guaranteeing their safety, before massacring them. Between 45,000 and 50,000 people died there.
Finally, a site in Bisesero commemorates in particular the resistance waged, with spears, machetes and sticks, by Tutsis in the face of the genocidaires who murdered hundreds of people in the hills of that region in the west of the country.
