Rwandan President Paul Kagame on Sunday accused the outside world of deliberately failing to prevent genocide, opening a week to mark the 10th anniversary of the killing of some 800,000 fellow countrymen.
The UN, the US and European countries have all faced criticism for failing to intervene during the three-month genocide in Rwanda, which ended in July 1994 when Kagame seized the capital at the head of a rebel army.
"We should always bear in mind that genocide, wherever it happens, represents the international community's failure, which I would in fact characterize as deliberate, as convenient failure," Kagame told the start of a genocide conference.
"How could a million lives of the Rwandan people be regarded as so insignificant by anyone in terms of strategic or national interest?" he told the meeting at a hotel used 10 years ago as a base by military planners directing the massacres.
"Do the powerful nations have a hidden agenda? I would hate to believe that this agenda is dictated by racist considerations or the color of the skin, I hope it is not true," he said.
Speakers opening the three-day conference said the world had compounded its lack of intervention to stop the slaughter by failing to help the survivors, many of whom were infected with AIDS by the militiamen who raped them during the massacres.
"The international community still continues after the genocide to display total indifference to the survivors' unspeakable moral and physical suffering," said Francois Garambe, chairman of the Ibuka genocide survivors group.
Stephen Smith, director of Aegis Trust, a British-based charity dedicated to preventing genocide, said the world's failure in Rwanda had left the country with a terrible legacy of trauma which should encourage preventive action in future.
"In this city, you know, there are still more nightmares than dreams, because you know personally, that just 10 years ago, someone hacked your father to death, sliced through your brother, raped your mother," he told several hundred delegates.
"Never forget Rwanda, let it be a dangerous, unsettling, unnerving memory," he said.
On Sunday, a Rwandan Cabinet minister said a 2001 census showed there were 937,000 victims of the genocide, reviving a debate over the death toll which has seen conflicting numbers of deaths ranging from 500,000 to 1 million.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, created by the UN to prosecute perpetrators, estimates that "some 800,000 Rwandans were killed" between April and July 1994.
The genocide began after a plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundian presidents was shot down on April 6, 1994, triggering an attempt by Hutu extremists to exterminate their opponents to preserve the Hutus' decades-long dominance.
The conference ahead of a formal memorial ceremony tomorrow will draw participants from around the world, including Canadian former lieutenant-general Romeo Dallaire who led a UN force in Rwanda during the killings. He has been haunted by guilt over his failure to save more lives.
Kagame paid tribute to Dallaire in his speech as a "very good man," and revealed for the first time that he had considered seizing the weapons of Dallaire's force to use in his military campaign but had decided against the idea.
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