On this date in 1998, 22 people were tied to wooden stakes in five different cities around Rwanda, then shot dead for their participation in the horrific 1994 Rwanda genocide.
Rwanda had, only shortly before, reversed a ban on public executions — clearly with this date’s spectacle in mind.
A Washington Post reporter described the scene in the capital city of Kigali, where 7,000 to 10,000 witnesses saw the three men and a woman put to death on Nyamirambo Stadium‘s red clay football pitch.
dressed in pale pink uniforms, under a sun that had just driven away a covering of gray clouds.
Four masked police officers leaped from a truck and sprinted to within feet of the black-square targets on the criminals’ chests.
As bullets from AK-47s shredded the prisoners, a sudden sharp silence descended on the crowd. Then a fifth marksman shot each prisoner in the head at point-blank range. Twice.
One man sprinted and danced when the shooting stopped. Women ululated.
A man named Andrew, 45, clapped lustily. “God is great!” he cried.
(Here’s another first-person account of the same execution.)
Among those dying before their eyes that day was the politician Froduald Karamira, once the vice president of the Rwandan Republican Democratic Movement and a prime mover in the 1994 genocide.
Although Karamira was actually born a Tutsi, he “converted” into a Hutu* and how. He established himself as a leading exponent of “Hutu Power” — the chilling banner under which upwards of a million Rwandans were slaughtered — and had control of two of the radio stations inciting Hutu death squads to their bloody work.
According to Hands Off Cain, these are the last executions ever carried out in Rwanda before it abolished the death penalty in 2007.
“Our experience in Rwanda has demonstrated that abolishing the death penalty gave new lease on life and this has contributed to the healing of our society,” said long-serving Rwanda President Paul Kagame, a Tutsi. “Rwandans have achieved a degree of unity and reconciliation, unimaginable just a decade and a half ago because a culture of forgiveness — not vengeance — has taken root.”
* Rwanda’s ethnic categories are notoriously artificial.
On this day..
- 1935: Three Venizelist officers
- 1821: Athanasios Diakos, Greek War of Independence hero
- 1752: Nicholas Mooney, penitent thief
- 1852: Nathaniel Bowman, William Ide inspiration
- 1889: William Henry Bury, Jack the Ripper suspect
- 1751: Anna Schnidenwind, the last witch in Baden-Württemberg
- 1922: Colin Campbell Ross, for the Gun Alley Murder
- 1945: A day in the death penalty around the Reich
- 1655: Massacre of Waldensians
- 1723: Major Jean Abram Davel
- 1521: The Comuneros of Castile
- 1868: John Millian, who martyred a madam