REMAINS OF 4,630 victims of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi were on Saturday given a decent burial in Rubavu District, after they were exhumed from different mass graves across the district.

Most of these victims had been dumped in mass graves around the former cemetery in Gisenyi town where many Tutsi had been lured by the militiamen before they were killed. The search for more remains is ongoing.

Dr Jean Damascene Ntawukuriryayo, the senate president, said it is unfortunate that some victims are yet to be given a decent burial, 20 years after the Genocide, because some perpetrators are reluctant to reveal the whereabouts of the remains.

"A decent burial is the least we can give our departed ones,” he said.

Ntawukuriryayo urged Rwandans to embrace government programmes that promote unity and reconciliation and desist from anything that can lead them back to the dark days.

The former Gisenyi prefecture is one of the first places where the Genocide was experimented in the early 1990s. Tutsis from the Bigogwe area who were accused of being accomplices of Rwanda Patriotic Front were killed by the then government. Claudine Mukamuvara, a Genocide survivor in Rubavu, gave a chilling testimony of how the Tutsi in Gisenyi town were tortured long before the Genocide.