Conference recommends reparations fund for genocide victims

An international conference on prevention of genocide recommended on Tuesday that an international fund be established to cater for reparations of victims of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.

The conference, whose theme was "Preventing and banishing genocide forever through universal active solidarity", recommended that the UN and countries that could have intervened to stop the genocide but failed to do so should pay reparations "for the material, psychological and moral losses incurred".

Belgium, Britain, France and the US as well as the Roman Catholic Church came under repeated criticism during the conference. Some accused them of involvement and others of maintaining silence as extremists Hutus killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus.

The conference also called upon the UN to cater for medical and psychological support for rape victims, a large number of whom had become infected with HIV/AIDS.

A survey carried out by AVEGA, an umbrella organisation that groups widows of the genocide, showed that Hutu extremists raped up to 80 percent of its members during the genocide.

The UN Security Council should adopt a resolution which explicitly recognises and condemns, without equivocation, the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda, participants said in recommendations made at the end of the three-day conference .

They called upon UN member countries to enact legislation that puts in place punitive measures for individuals and organisations that develop and propagate the ideology of genocide.

Criticism

Participants also accused the UN as well as the international community in general of "choosing to ignore" the killings by refusing the then UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda to protect civilians and for failing to reinforce the size of the force.

"You were abandoned," Romeo Dallaire, former head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, said. "You are an orphaned country."

Dallaire told the more than 600 participants that the Rwandan genocide was "brutal, criminal, disgusting" and continued for 100 days under the full glare of the international community.

"The international community did not give one damn for any Rwandan because Rwandans do not count. Rwanda was of no strategic value to anybody and had no strategic resources," he said.

Probe

The participants recommended that a commission of inquiry be established to investigate the role of France in the killings.

"The world decided to abandon the Tutsi of Rwanda at the time they were being exterminated. Trying to minimise and trivialise the genocide is as good as denying the Jewish holocaust," Gerry Caplan, a Canadian who has written a book on the genocide, told the conference.