The difficulty of trying to stop it happening ever again

Fifteen years on, the country is praised for salving the wounds of genocide. Yet that comes at the price of diminishing freedom. And now the economy is falteringEVEN today, it is almost impossible to imagine how so many Rwandans could have turned into coldblooded butchers. The memorials to the slain that now grace many of the towns and villages in the country provide only small glimpses into the collective insanity that gripped a whole country in April 1994, when the Hutu killers turned on their Tutsi fellow citizens and Hutu sympathisers, leaving over 800,000 dead in three months.Take the memorial at the National University of Rwanda in Butare, a couple of hours drive south-west of the capital, Kigali. Under a corrugated iron roof a long board displays the photographs of about 60 students who were killed. In fact, most of the staff and students at the university, over 500 in all, were slaughtered in just two weeks or so; only a few escaped across the nearby borders to Congo or Burundi. Many of the students were killed by their own teachers, specifically the dean of agriculture and vice-dean of political science. The former not only personally killed students but organised the campus massacre as well. What could have been running through their minds in the weeks leading up to the killings, as these highly educated people calculated how best they could hack or shoot their own students to death? ...