Camp Kigali: Where 10 Belgian Soldiers Were Killed

Camp Kigali is situated at Avenue de l'Armée, close to the Intercontinental Hotel, and not far from Centre Hospitalier de Kigali. Today, the Camp is a Belgian commemoration site and remains as a tribute to the soldiers. It hosts a small museum and provides you with a first introduction to the horrible events of 1994. The drama began shortly after the death of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana in a still unexplained plane crash on April 6, 1994. Lotin and his men were given orders about 2 a.m. the next day to take Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana to the radio station to make an appeal for calm. When the 10 peacekeepers arrived at the prime minister's house, soldiers of the Hutu army opened fire with rifles and grenades. After about two hours, the prime minister ignored Lotin's advice and fled. She was caught and murdered. A Hutu officer ordered the surrounded and outgunned Belgians to give up their weapons or be killed. Lotin's battalion commander, Lt. Col. Jo Dewez, authorized him by radio to do so. Lotin and his men were taken to a Rwandan military base, where an officer accused Belgian troops of shooting down the president's plane. Soldiers at the base went wild with machetes, bayonets and guns. Four of the paratroopers were cut down immediately. Lotin and the rest ran to a building, where another was trapped and killed. A Rwandan soldier tried to break into the room where the survivors barricaded themselves, but Lotin killed him with a pistol he had kept hidden and grabbed the soldier's AK-47 rifle. The Belgians held out with those two weapons for three hours, when grenades dropped into the room through the roof ended resistance. All the bodies were stripped of valuables and mutilated. Two weeks later, faced with a shocked and distraught nation, Belgium's government withdrew its 450-man battalion from the U.N. force in Rwanda.