In this compound in Kigali, Rwanda, 10 Belgian soldiers working under the UN Mission in Rwanda, were shot sporadically and their lives ended in the wake of the genocide that occurred in the country in 1994.
You did an excellent job there. Very well shown. Just to be more complete: It was 3 a.m. when the belgian UN soldiers were dispatched from the airport to the prime minister’s house. It took them 3 hours to get there because of all the roadblocks thrown in the way by the then government’s army. They eventually arrived around 6 a.m. They did not live in Camp Kigali, which is the site you show in the vid. They were taken there against their will from the prime minister’s house just to be eliminated. It was a regular Rwandan army base, occupied by Rwandan soldiers only. The sole foreigner regularly present there was a Togolese captain who served as a UN observer. Moreover, the prime minister’s guard included at least 15 UN soldiers: The 10 belgians plus 5 Ghanaians. The trouble for them started around 7 a.m. “Several times that morning, the soldiers guarding the Prime Minister were told by the Rwandese soldiers *surrounding them* to surrender their arms. According to Belgian records, at 08.49, Lt Lotin [the team leader] was told by his commander, Lt Col Dewez [a fellow Belgian], that his group should not let themselves be disarmed, and to negotiate, to which Lotin replied that it was too late because four men were already disarmed. Dewez then stated that Lotin was authorized to surrender arms if he felt it necessary. The UNAMIR troops were subsequently taken by an army minibus to Camp Kigali. Lotin borrowed the Motorola of the Togolese military observer at the camp in order to inform Dewez about the situation, also stating that his men risked being lynched. Dewez, having first asked whether Lotin was not exaggerating, then informed his Sector Command [a Belgian colonel] and asked that the Rwandan army or Rutbat (the Bangladeshi battalion) intervene. Meanwhile, however, in Camp Kigali, the United Nations peacekeepers were badly beaten, and later, after the Ghanaian peacekeepers and the Togolese had been led away, the Belgian soldiers were bru tally kyl led.”
That's beautiful. So glad to hear this. I was in Kenya on the first day of the Finance Bill Protest. We had a stopover at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on our way to Kigali. I saw the protest face to face and had to recede to the Airport. My prayers are with your country men and women. I want to see Kenya come out of this. Thanks a million, ones again.
Ekemene I love your work, your passion and I too I would like to be like you and if possible be part of your team to rebuild and document the history of Kenya
You have been doing a marvelous job...iam good in history,and keep following you...may Allah bless you ,and help us in the history field to build a good history of Africa...
The greatest curse placed on Africa is the identification of and by tribe. What have we gained from tribe if not division, segregation and discrimination? We are all black and other races do not care by what clan or tribe you're called, to them we are all Africans. We have the tendency of fighting for supremacy over our own brothers forgetting that we have common sufferings and goals. That is why it is easy for an enemy to break out ranks.
I totally agree with you. Tribal identification was a major tool in the April 1994 genocidal killings that went on in Rwanda. But one commendable thing that President Paul Kagame has done is, to exclude tribal identification from their national ID cards. I looked through a number of the ID cards and i saw no tribal identification. Everyone is a citizen; not Tutsi nor Hutu nor Twa.
