Kibeho

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Coordinates: 2°38′S 29°33′E / -2.633, 29.55
Kibeho
Kibeho Location in Rwanda
Country	Rwanda
Admin. Province	South Province
District
Government
- Mayor

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.

After the 1994 genocide, Kibeho was the site of a refugee camp, with many of the refugees suspected of having participated in the genocide. The camp, which held between 165,000 to 200,000 persons, was one of the more gruesome sights of the reprisal massacres against Hutu by the Tutsi-led "Rwandan Patriotic Army" (RPA) (formerly the Rwandan Patriotic Front) that followed the 1994 genocide. Estimates of the number killed range from 4000 to 8000 people. 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. 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, supported by Pallottines.

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. Writing in the Australian Army Journal, Paul Jordan, one of the officers who witnessed the killings, has said that:

"While there was little that we could have done to stop the killings, I believe that, if Australians had not been there as witnesses to the massacre, the RPA would have killed every single person in the camp."