Rwandan genocide

The Rwandan genocide happened between April and July 1994. 







  The genocide lasted for 100 days. Around 800,000 were murdered.

Overview

In a genocide, many or all people of a group are killed on the basis of their ethnicity, skin colour, religion, ideology or social affiliations. 





In the Rwandan genocide, members of an ethnic group the Tutsi (abatutsi), were killed on the basis of their ethnicity. The murderers were extremist members of another ethnic group, the Hutu (abahutu). The Hutu killers also killed other Hutus whose beliefs were not as extreme as theirs.

Background


In 1994, 85% of Rwandans were Hutus. However, the Tutsi minority had had more power and run the Rwandan government for many years. In 1959, the Hutus overthrew the Tutsi government and took power. Tens of thousands of Tutsis ran away to nearby countries.

A group of the Tutsis in exile made a rebel group, called the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The RPF invaded Rwanda in 1990, which started the Rwandan Civil War. The Tutsi rebels and the Hutu government fought until 1993, when the two sides signed a peace agreement. However, on April 6, 1994, an airplane carrying the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down and destroyed. 

Both presidents were Hutus. No one knows for sure who destroyed the plane. The RPF said that Hutu extremists had shot down the plane, as they wanted to justify killing people. However, the Hutu extremists pointed to the Tutsi RPF as those who had destroyed the plane. 

Right away, Hutu extremists started slaughtering Tutsis. In a half an hour, Hutu militias had blocked roads all over Kigali, Rwanda's capital. They stopped every passing car and killed every Tutsi they saw. The Rwandan genocide began that day.

Events

For 100 days, members of the Hutu government's army, militias, and even civilians would kill 800,000 people, an average of 8,000 people per day. This makes the Rwandan genocide one of the most horrifying genocides in history.

The two main militias that carried out the killings were the Interahamwe and the Impuzamugambi. They were youth organizations of two pro-Hutu political parties that had been turned by the government into militias to carry out the genocide.

Within a few hours after the Presidents' deaths, military leaders in Rwanda's different provinces called together militia and civilians. They told them that the Rwandan President was dead and that the Tutsi RPF had killed him. They ordered the crowd to kill Tutsis and said things like "Begin your work!" and "Spare no one!", including babies.thumb|The building where ten Belgian soldiers were tortured and killed.

Prelude

Just after the Presidents' deaths, Hutu extremists assassinated the Rwandan prime minister. They also tortured and killed the ten Belgian soldiers who had been assigned to protect her. Between April 6 and April 7, Hutu militias and the Rwandan Army then got lists of people in the government who were political moderates. They found the people in Kigali and killed themDallaire, Roméo (2005). Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. London: Arrow Books. pp. 231-3. .p. 230 so that the moderates would not be able to stop the genocide.Other Genocides in the 20th (and 21st) Century. (PowerPoint.) Eagle Mountain Saginaw ISD. Retrieved April 11, 2016.  

They also killed journalists and human rights activists who had spoken out against the Hutu government.  Philip Gourevitch from The New Yorker said the leaders of the clear and "planned" genocide wanted it to look unclear and "unplanned".

Genocide of Tutsis

On the night of April 6, Hutu militias also went house to house in Kigali and killed Tutsis. By the morning of April 7, the killings had got worse. Interahamwe killed and looted however they wanted. Other countries' journalists filmed many of those things. In a few days, the genocide had spread across Rwanda. As the genocide spread out to rural parts of Rwanda, the killers paid less attention to slaughtering moderate Hutus and more attention to massacring Tutsis.thumb|Machetes and clubs used to kill Tutsis, now displayed in a museum.

Spread

The Rwandan genocide was well-organized. For instance, the genocide's ringleaders circulated lists of people who were against the Hutu-led regime. They gave the lists to militias, who went and killed those people, along with their families.  

The militias also blocked roads to identify Tutsis to be killed, as identification cards in Rwanda then indicated the holder's ethnicity. When they found a Tutsi, the militias would kill the person. Machetes were widely used as murder weapons.  When Tutsis tried to hide from the killers, the militias would search every building in an area, inch by inch until they found the people who were hiding. 

The army and militias were very brutal towards women. They raped between 150,000 and 250,000 Tutsi women. They also kidnapped women and forced them to be sex slaves. Following the rapes, the rapists would often mutilate the women's sex organs with weapons, boiling water, or acid. 



Most victims of the genocide were killed in their own villages. Often, they were killed by their own neighbours. Government radio stations encouraged regular people to kill their Tutsi neighbours. Hutus who refused to kill Tutsis were often executed immediately. Husbands killed their Tutsi wives because they were scared of being killed if they refused. There were even priests and nuns who were later convicted of killing people who had tried to hide in churches. As the historian Richard Prunier explained,p. 247

Propaganda

Dehumanization

The killers used propaganda to encourage the genocide. They set up radio stations and newspapers that were full of hate speech. Often, they incited people to "weed out the cockroaches", meaning "kill all the Tutsis". The killers would read out the names of people they wanted to be killed over the radio. Radio stations told their listeners to make sure they disemboweled pregnant Tutsi women.

United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda

In October 1993, the United Nations Security Council created the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). It was supposed to help put the 1993 peace agreement into place. However, the UNAMIR did not have permission from the Security Council to protect civilians or try to stop the genocide.  

Back then, the UNAMIR soldiers were allowed to shoot their weapons only in self-defence, if somebody was attacking them personally. They were not allowed to use their weapons or get involved to protect civilians who were being attacked.thumb|UNAMIR CommanderRoméo Dallaire asked the UN repeatedly for more troops but was ignored and so was not able to stop the genocide.

Responses

United Nations Security Council

The UNAMIR's peacekeeping troops were being attacked more and more often. Countries began to pull their soldiers out of Rwanda. Some members of the UNSC, like the United States, argued strongly that the UN should take all of its peacekeeping troops out of Rwanda. 

Eventually, the Security Council decided to decrease the number of troops that the UNAMIR was allowed to have. On April 21, 1994, as the genocide was spreading across Rwanda, the Security Council decreased the number of allowed UNAMIR troops from 2,548 to 270, a decrease of almost 90%.

UNAMIR Commander Roméo Dallaire kept asking the United Nations for more troops. On May 15, the Security Council increased UNAMIR's allowed number of troops to 5,500. However, it took almost six months for UN member countries to volunteer this many troops.  Meanwhile, the genocide continued.

Operation Turquoise

France offered to lead a humanitarian mission in southwestern Rwanda while UNAMIR was trying to gather more troops. The Security Council approved the mission on June 22, 1994. France called the mission "Operation Turquoise". It had soldiers from France and other countries set up a "safe zone" in southwest Rwanda. That was meant to be an area where people could come to be protected from Hutu attacks. Historians think that Operation Turquoise saved 13,000 to 14,000 lives.p. 308  However, France has been accused of letting war criminals escape Rwanda through the safe zone.

Massacres

Because UNAMIR troops were not allowed to use their weapons to protect civilians, the militias were massacred civilians even when UNAMIR troops were nearby.

Kigali

For example, on April 7, 1994, Belgian soldiers were staying at a school outside Kigali. Thousands of Tutsis ran from Kigali to the school in the hope that the soldiers would protect them from the massacres that were happening in Kigali. Hutu militia surrounded the school but did not enter because they were afraid of the Belgian soldiers.

However, one day, the Belgian were ordered to leave so that they could take Europeans to the airport to get them out of the country.  Later, a Belgian colonel "said the young soldiers told him they saw the killers in their rearview mirrors" as they drove away. After the soldiers left, the Hutu militia killed thousands of Tutsis.

Murambi Technical School


Another massacre happened in Murambi, a town in southern Rwanda. When the genocide reached Murambi,Tutsis tried to hide at a church. However, the bishop and the mayor tricked them by telling them to go to the Murambi Technical School. They said the French soldiers there would protect them. 

On April 16, 1994, about 65,000 Tutsis ran to the school.  One survivor said: "They gave us four [French soldiers] for protection, but from 17 April we never saw them again". After they got to the school, the Tutsis had no food. The school's water was also cut off so that the Tutsis would be too weak to fight back.  

The Tutsis still fought back for a few days by using stones. However, on April 21, the school was attacked by the Interahamwe, which killed about 45,000 Tutsis at the school. The other 20,000 Tutsis ran to a nearby church to hide, but the militia found them there and killed almost all of them.

The school is now a genocide museum.m which displays claim that merely 34 people out of 65,000 survived the massacre.  It also states that after the massacre, the French soldiers came back, buried the bodies in mass graves and put a volleyball court over the mass graves to hide what had happened.

Independent investigations

In 1999, Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, asked for an independent report about the genocide. He wanted to know why the United Nations and the world had "failed" to stop the genocide. The report said that the major failures were:
 Not having enough resources (such as well-equipped peacekeeping forces)
 International lack of political will to stop the genocide of the Tutsis since countries did not want to stop the genocide 
 International indifference to the scale of the genocide happening to the Tutsis

End of the genocide

The Ugandan Army joined the RPF in fighting the Hutu extremists, who were gradually defeated across Rwanda. On July 4, 1994, the RPF–Ugandan forces took over Kigali to overthrow the extremist regime. Afterwards, about 2,000,000 Hutus fled to Zaire, a neighbouring country.  According to the BBC, " say the RPF killed thousands of Hutu civilians as they took power  and more after they went into [Zaire] to [follow] the Interahamwe. The RPF denies this."

Victims


In 1994, Rwanda's population was 7,900,000. The genocide caused the following:

 800,000 people had been killed (10% of the population)
 300,000 children inclusive
 2,000,000 people fled to other countries – 25% of the population
 Up to 2,000,000 people were internally displaced (they had to leave their homes and escape to other parts of Rwanda) (another 25% of the population)
 95,000 children became parentless
Before the genocide, about 1,100,000 of Rwandans were Tutsis. After the genocide, only about 300,000 Tutsis remained in the country.  Almost 75% Tutsis in Rwanda had been killed during the genocide.

Aftermath

International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

In 1995, the UNSC set up the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Its goal was to prosecute people who took part in genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity, and punish the guilty ones.  The ICTR had the power to prosecute anyone who broke international laws about human rights.

The ICTR was the first international court ever to:
 Find people guilty of genocide
 Find that rape and sexual assault are ways of committing genocide
 Find members of the mass media guilty for broadcasting propaganda that incited genocide

Out of 93 people indicted by the ICTR, 61 were found guilty and sent to prison. Another ten cases were sent to Rwanda so their own courts could hear the cases. Three people indicted by the ICTR are still fugitives. The ICTR closed on December 31, 2015.

Rwandan courts

The Rwandan government could not start trying genocide suspects until 1996 because so many judges had been killed in the genocide, and so many court buildings and jails had been destroyed.

By 2000, there were over 100,000 suspects waiting for trials. The regular Rwandan courts could not handle this many cases. To help with this problem, the government set up a new and different system of courts to help the regular Rwandan courts. By mid-2006, the Rwandan courts had tried over 10,000 genocide suspects.

A person has been extradited from a European country, as late as 2025.https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/rwandan-man-accused-1994-genocide-repatriated-norway-2025-08-08/. Reuters.com. Retrieved 2025-08-08


Gacaca courts

In 2001, the Rwandan government launched a system of Gacaca courts (pronounced "GA-CHA-CHA").  In these courts, Rwandans elect judges to hear genocide suspects'  trials. Gacaca courts may hear cases about any crimes except planning genocide or rape, which must be heard by regular Rwandan courts.

When a suspect is found guilty, the Gacaca courts hand out less serious sentences.  The goal of the Gacaca courts is to get justice while also moving towards reconciliation. It also gives perpetrators chances to admit what they did and the victims chances to learn of what happened to their loved ones respectively. Between 2001 and 2012, 12,000 Gacaca courts tried over 1,200,000 cases across Rwanda. They finished their work on May 4, 2012.

Denial

Since the end of the Rwandan genocide, there have been deniers of the genocide worldwide across the political spectrum. 





2010s

Two of the notable deniers were the American economist Edward S. Herman (1925 – 2017) and David Peterson, who published two books in 2010 and 2014 respectively accusing Western media of "selling" the Rwandan genocide as a genocide for the sake of "promoting" what these two scholars claimed to be "economic and intellectual agendas of the U.S." despite the actual lack of Western media attention to the events during the Rwandan genocide. 

Trivia

Meanwhile, Edward S. Herman had published several books objecting to the genocide classification and doubting the confirmed death tolls of the Cambodian genocide 

  and Bosnian genocide, 







  which made him a subject of media criticism.

2020s

In December 2024, the French-Cameroonian writer Charles Onana was convicted of downplaying the Rwandan genocide. 

  He was ordered to pay €8,400, and his publisher was to pay €5,000, as French laws ban the denial of any genocide that is recognised by the French government.

Related pages

 The Holocaust
 Bosnian genocide
 Cambodian genocide

Notes

References

Other websites

 Facts about the Rwandan Genocide (in Simple English)
 Rwanda: How the genocide happened (from BBC)
 Genocides: Rwanda 1994  (from the Peace Pledge Union)

Category:War crimes
Category:1994 in Africa
Category:Rwandan genocide
Category:June 1994 events
Category:April 1994 events
Category:Murder in the 1990s
Category:Genocides in Africa
Category:Mass murder in Africa
Category:Incidents of violence against women