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President Thabo Mbeki has sincerely apologised to the Rwandans for South Africa's involvement in the genocide in that country a decade ago, saying the previous apartheid regime supplied weapons used in the massacre.

He was addressing thousands of Rwandans gathered at the Kigali Stadium in Kigali to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 1994 genocide.

President Mbeki said when the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) requested South Africans to ask the apartheid regime to stop the supply of the weapons of death, the latter boldly asserted the precedence of profit from the sale of the instruments of death over the lives of the people of Rwanda.

"To that extent, we too as South Africans contributed to the diabolical slaughter of the innocents.

"We hope that by the admission of these truths we can contribute even an infinitesimal fraction of the balm that helps to moderate the sharp pain of the remembering of a crime that is too fresh to have receded into the mists of history," he apologised.

He added that time such as this demanded that the whole truth ought to be told because not to tell it is to create the conditions for the crime to recur.

President Mbeki said it was inevitable that many questions would and must be asked and answers demanded.

"What did we as Africans do to stop the slaughter? If we did nothing, why did we do nothing?

"Why did the United Nations, set up to ensure that genocide, as occurred when the Holocaust was visited on the Jewish people, did not recur anywhere in the world, stand by as Africans were exterminated like pernicious vermin?

"Why were General Romeo Dallaire and his undermanned contingent of UN peacekeepers abandoned by the same people who sent them to Rwanda?

"Why did those who dispose of enormous global power that has been used to determine the fate of all humanity, decide that the slaughter in Yugoslavia had to be stopped at all costs, while the bigger slaughter in Rwanda should be allowed to run its full course?

"Have all the guilty been identified, whatever their contribution to the commission of the genocide?

"Have the necessary lessons been learnt? What are those lessons? Who has learnt them? What have these done with the knowledge they have acquired?" he queried.

Everyday, he said, the severed heads and skeletons stored at the sites of the massacres point an accusing finger at all who did not do what they should have done to stop the murderous rampage.

"Everyday they remind us that we cannot merely say the Rwanda Genocide occurred and treat it just as an historical episode that has passed."

Over 800 000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were massacred over a period of 100 days in a spate of violence during the genocide.

It was sparked by the death of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, when his plane was shot down above Kigali airport on 6 April 1994.

Tutsis were blamed for the tragedy and within hours, aided by radio propaganda, Hutus called for the 'ethnic cleansing of Tutsis'.

The international community, particularly the UN, was blamed for not acting decisively to combat the genocide in its early stages.

Head of the UN peacekeeping forces at the time and current Secretary-General Kofi Annan early this week accepted institutional responsibility for the genocide, saying he realised that he could and should have done more to avert the tragedy -BuaNews.

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