Feb 19, 2008 12:20 am US/Pacific
Bush To Honor Rwanda Genocide Victims
KIGALI, Rwanda (AP) ―
President Bush visited a memorial of Rwanda's 1994 genocide on Tuesday, calling it a reminder that "evil cannot be tolerated" in the world.
On a five-nation trip of Africa, Bush went to a site in Kigali where some remains of more than 250,000 victims of the genocide are buried. He said that seeing the memorial cannot help but shake one's emotions to the "very foundation."
"We must not let these kind of actions take place," Bush said of the genocide against the Tutsi minority and politically moderate Hutus.
Over 100 days, roughly 800,000 people were shot, clubbed and hacked to death.
On his way to the memorial, Bush's motorcade passed squat homes tucked into red clay hillsides and the valley below. Curious onlookers lined the roads, but the crowds of people who came out to see him were smaller than those he experienced in Tanzania.
During a tour of the memorial, Bush, his wife and senior aides saw a children's exhibit of photos and biographical information of the young people who were slaughtered. One of them was 4-year-old Ariane, who liked to sing and dance and loved cake and milk. She was fatally stabbed in her eyes and head.
The president and Mrs. Bush, both grim-faced, walked out of the memorial and laid a wreath on a bed of stones. Mrs. Bush leaned over to straighten a purple sash on the wreath. he two stood silently with heads bowed in a moment of silence.
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