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KIGALI (Reuters) - An opposition leader has called for a debate about the ethnic make-up of Rwandan governments, stoking a sensitive debate over ethnicity and reconciliation 16 years after the country's genocide.

Victoire Ingabire, leader of the United Democratic Forces (UDF) party, returned to the central African nation this week from the Netherlands to start a bid for the presidency.

But genocide survivor groups and the government accuse her of using tribal rivalries and the 100-day slaughter in 1994, in which 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were killed, as campaign tools ahead of August's election.

Ingabire denies it and says outstanding ethnic issues must be addressed to forge true reconciliation and lasting stability.

"There was a genocide against the Tutsis. That is the reality ... but we don't have to forget that there were also crimes against humanity against the Hutu people," she told Reuters in an interview late on Wednesday.

"The problem is (how) to share the power between the two groups, and if we don't have the authorisation to talk about it, we will not resolve the problem."

Democracy and freedom of speech remain delicate topics in a country where corruption of the media and the political endorsement of ethnic hatred in the early 1990s lead to the genocide, following years of dictatorship.

"If you have a little group who have all the economy in their hands, and the majority of the Rwandese people, they are poor, that can also be a source of the conflict," she said.