The big draw of a holiday in Rwanda used to be gorilla watching, but soon the star lure will be the unusual holiday activity of watching war-crimes tribunals. 'When most people think of Rwanda nowadays they think of genocide,' a Rwandan spokesperson told Escape at the World Travel Market in London Docklands last week. 'We wanted to confront this and put it into the correct historical context for visitors to our country.'
Attending a court session in the capital Kigali will be the climax of a culture tour which will take the traveller on a chronological journey across the central African nation's land and 500 years of history. Highlights will include re-enactments of life in the court of the pre-colonial kings in Nganze, the coffee and tea plantations of colonial times at Lake Kivu, a Peace and Conflict Resolution museum in Ngongame and the bunker hideouts of the Rwandan Patriotic Front army which finally halted the slaughter.
This is one of two new tours to be launched next September, as part of an initiative to rebuild the country's tourism infrastructure - shattered during the 1994 genocide turned civil war, in which at least 800,000 Rwandans were killed.
The second is a Primate Certification Tour, which will incorporate the mountain gorillas in the jungle-clad volcanoes of Virunga - made famous by US zoologist Dian Fossey - along with 13 species of primate in the Nyungwe Rainforest. The visitor will also be taught about animal behaviour by leading scientists.
Rwanda, known as the 'land of a thousand hills', has long been renowned for its lakes, mountains and wildlife but for the last 40 years it has been dogged by fighting between the predominant Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups, with more than 1.4 million people killed. Around 115,000 Hutu genocide suspects are still held in Rwandan jails awaiting trial, and the speed of trials has been slow with only around 15,000 tried so far.
A. Malik Fal, project director of On The Frontier, a consultancy helping rebuild Rwanda's economy, says: 'We need better hotels in tourist areas outside of the capital. But most of all we need guides, translators and staff for the industry. Many of the people who used to work in these jobs are dead or in jail.'
