Gatumba is a small town about ten miles from Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, and close to the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is an unexceptional place in a vast reach of grasslands and marshes at the northern end of Lake Tanganyika. There are military and police camps and, ten years ago, a refugee camp housing about 500 Burundians, recently repatriated after a period of exile in Congo, and some 825 Congolese refugees, almost all from the southern Lake Kivu area, on the border with Rwanda. In the night of August 13th 2004 an armed militia group crossed the marshes from the direction of the border with Congo and attacked the Gatumba refugee camp. 164 people were killed, almost all of whom were Banyamulenge, a Kinyarwanda-speaking people who live largely in the high plateaus of South Kivu. A further 106 were wounded. Most victims were women and children. To mark the tenth anniversary of the atrocity at Gatumba refugee camp is to insist on the political specificity of the event: that it should and could have been prevented, that everyone in the camp on August 13th should have been equally protected; that governments and international organizations should have acted decisively to bring justice to the dead and closure to those left behind. In particular, to commemorate Gatumba is to insist on the continuing urgency of ensuring human rights for refugees, whether in Congo and Burundi, or here in Britain. To come together with the Banyamulenge community is to insist on respect with the humanity of face-to-face engagement.In doing this, Gatumba ceases to be an unexceptional place in the centre of Africa, and becomes a marker for the circumstances of refugees everywhere, and for a future in which such atrocities cannot be ignored, or allowed.