<u>Government officials downplayed the severity of the crimes committed.</u>
<u>Explanation:</u>
Remember, it was a question asked by a journalist to a US state department press conference in which the US spokeswoman Christine Shelley avoids applying the term "genocide" to the what was happening in <em>Rwanda</em>. Despite the fact that there had been an ethic cleansing of the Tutsi tribe, with more thousands of dead bodies on the streets. Thus, government officials initially showed a lack of admittance to the severity of what was happening in Rwanda.
I believe they were walked to the guillotine and told to kneel at the head of it. They would then be executed while people watched. It was brutal in that time.