GG apologizes for Rwandan genocide inaction

Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean has apologized to Rwandan leaders for Canada's "inaction" during the 1994 genocide in the African country.

"The world's failure to respond adequately to the genocide is a failure in which Canada — as part of the international community — readily acknowledges its fair share of responsibility," said Jean, after a visit Wednesday to the Gisozi Genocide Memorial Centre, a mass grave in the city of Kigali, in central Rwanda, where more than 250,000 bodies are buried.

"I think we could have made a difference," she told reporters later. "I think we could have prevented the magnitude of the horror that brought genocide here."

The message was written in collaboration with the Foreign Affairs Department, according to Marthe Blouin, the governor general's official spokeswoman. It was also cleared at the highest levels of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government, officials said.

Approximately 800,000 people of ethnic Tutsi origin and politically moderate members of Rwanda's majority ethnic group, the Hutus, were systematically slaughtered by extremist Hutus between April and June of 1994.

The genocide was sparked when a plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down over the Kigali airport on April 6, 1994.

Ethnic tensions between Hutus, which then made up approximately 85 per cent of Rwanda's population, and Tutsis date back to the colonial period at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century.

In that period, German and later Belgian colonial powers heightened and exploited the population's ethnic differences for their own purposes.

Jean is the first top-level Canadian official to visit Rwanda since the genocide.

In 2004, the House of Commons moved unanimously to mark April 7, 2004, as a day of remembrance to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the genocide, encouraging the government and all Canadians "to reflect upon its lessons."

It moved a similar motion on April 7, 2008, to recognize the 14th anniversary of the massacre.

The memorial centre includes displays explaining how, historically, Hutus and Tutsis lived peacefully side by side, virtually indistinguishable from each other except that Tutsis were more modern urban-dwellers while Hutus lived primarily in the bush.

Videos explain that foreign powers arrived and created alliances with one group or the other, driving them apart and triggering resentments and hatred.