Kibeho

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Kibeho is a small town in south Rwanda, famous for various reports of sightings of the Virgin Mary and Jesus between 1981 and 1989.

The Virgin Mary and Christ reportedly appeared to teenagers, and these visions were accompanied by intense reactions: crying, tremors, and comas. On August 19, 1982, those who saw the visions reported gruesome sights (rivers of blood, sliced heads, etc.) which some today regard as an ominous foreshadowing of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, and particularly in that specific location in 1995.

The camp at Kibeho, which held between 165,000 to 200,000 persons, was one of the more gruesome sights of the genocide, where 4000 to 8000 people were killed. The worst of the killings took place over the weekend of April 22, 1995. Many of these were killed in the same school in which the apparitions had occurred; one of the children who reported the vision was even one of the victims. After the genocide, Kibeho was the site of a refugee camp, with many of the refugees being those who participated in the genocide. The camp was violently evacuated in 1995.

The local bishop, accused by many of complicity in the genocide himself, recognized officially on June 29, 2001 three cases as authentic. The church Notre-Dame des Douleurs (Our Lady of Sorrows) was built in Kibeho.

A group of UN Australian Army medical officers and infantry soldiers as well as the MSF were witness to the killings in April 1995, however were unable to defend the refugees because of strict rules of engagement. All they could do was provide medical assistance to the wounded.