Camp Kigali Memorial Editorial Image

Camp Kigali, Rwanda: the room where the last belgian soldiers were killed. Now, the Camp is a belgian commemoration. It hosts a small museum. Shortly after the death of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana in a 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. The prime minister was caught and murdered. 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.