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On April 7, 1994, violence fuels the launch of what would become the worst episode of genocide since World War II: the massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Following the first wave of massacres, Rwandan forces manage to discourage international intervention with the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers. The Tutsis, a minority group that made up about 10 percent of Rwanda's population, received no assistance from the international community, although the United Nations later conceded that a mere 5,000 soldiers deployed at the outset would have stopped the wholesale slaughter.

The immediate roots of the 1994 genocide dated back to the early 1990s, when President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, began using anti-Tutsi rhetoric to consolidate his power among the Hutus. Beginning in October 1990, there were several massacres of hundreds of Tutsis. Although the two ethnic groups were very similar, sharing the same language and culture for centuries, the law required registration based on ethnicity. The government and army began to assemble the Interahamwe (meaning "those who attack together") and prepared for the elimination of the Tutsis by arming Hutus with guns and machetes. In January 1994, the United Nations forces in Rwanda warned that larger massacres were imminent.

On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down. It is not known if the attack was carried out by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi military organization stationed outside the country at the time, or by Hutu extremists trying to instigate a mass killing. In any event, Hutu extremists in the military, led by Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, immediately went into action, murdering Tutsis and moderate Hutus within hours of the crash.

The Belgian peacekeepers were killed the next day, a key factor in the withdrawal of U.N. forces from Rwanda. Soon afterward, the radio stations in Rwanda were broadcasting appeals to the Hutu majority to kill all Tutsis in the country. The army and the national police directed the slaughter, sometimes threatening Hutu civilians when persuasion didn't work. Thousands of innocent people were hacked to death with machetes by their neighbors. Despite the horrific crimes, the international community, including the United States, hesitated to take any action. They wrongly ascribed the genocide to chaos amid tribal war. President Bill Clinton later called America's failure to do anything to stop the genocide "the biggest regret" of his administration.

It was left to the RPF, led by Paul Kagame, to begin an ultimately successful military campaign for control of Rwanda. By the summer, the RPF had defeated the Hutu forces and driven them out of the country and into several neighboring nations. However, by that time, an estimated 75 percent of the Tutsis living in Rwanda had been murdered.
READ MORE: The Rwandan Genocide

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Violence erupts in Rwanda, foreshadowing genocide

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On April 7, 1994, violence fuels the launch of what would become the worst episode of genocide since World War II: the massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Following the first wave of massacres, Rwandan forces manage to discourage international intervention with the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On April 7, 1994, violence fuels the launch of what would become the worst episode of genocide since World War II: the massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Following the first wave of massacres, Rwandan forces manage to discourage international intervention with the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers. The Tutsis, a minority group that made up about 10 percent of Rwanda's population, received no assistance from the international community, although the United Nations later conceded that a mere 5,000 soldiers deployed at the outset would have stopped the wholesale slaughter.

The immediate roots of the 1994 genocide dated back to the early 1990s, when President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, began using anti-Tutsi rhetoric to consolidate his power among the Hutus. Beginning in October 1990, there were several massacres of hundreds of Tutsis. Although the two ethnic groups were very similar, sharing the same language and culture for centuries, the law required registration based on ethnicity. The government and army began to assemble the Interahamwe (meaning "those who attack together") and prepared for the elimination of the Tutsis by arming Hutus with guns and machetes. In January 1994, the United Nations forces in Rwanda warned that larger massacres were imminent.

On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down. It is not known if the attack was carried out by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi military organization stationed outside the country at the time, or by Hutu extremists trying to instigate a mass killing. In any event, Hutu extremists in the military, led by Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, immediately went into action, murdering Tutsis and moderate Hutus within hours of the crash.

The Belgian peacekeepers were killed the next day, a key factor in the withdrawal of U.N. forces from Rwanda. Soon afterward, the radio stations in Rwanda were broadcasting appeals to the Hutu majority to kill all Tutsis in the country. The army and the national police directed the slaughter, sometimes threatening Hutu civilians when persuasion didn't work. Thousands of innocent people were hacked to death with machetes by their neighbors. Despite the horrific crimes, the international community, including the United States, hesitated to take any action. They wrongly ascribed the genocide to chaos amid tribal war. President Bill Clinton later called America's failure to do anything to stop the genocide "the biggest regret" of his administration.

It was left to the RPF, led by Paul Kagame, to begin an ultimately successful military campaign for control of Rwanda. By the summer, the RPF had defeated the Hutu forces and driven them out of the country and into several neighboring nations. However, by that time, an estimated 75 percent of the Tutsis living in Rwanda had been murdered.
READ MORE: The Rwandan Genocide

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Violence erupts in Rwanda, foreshadowing genocide

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On April 7, 1994, violence fuels the launch of what would become the worst episode of genocide since World War II: the massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Following the first wave of massacres, Rwandan forces manage to discourage international intervention with the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers.

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Between April and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days.

Most of the dead were Tutsis - and most of those who perpetrated the violence were Hutus.

Even for a country with such a turbulent history as Rwanda, the scale and speed of the slaughter left its people reeling.

The genocide was sparked by the death of the Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, when his plane was shot down above Kigali airport on 6 April 1994.

A French judge has blamed current Rwandan President, Paul Kagame - at the time the leader of a Tutsi rebel group - and some of his close associates for carrying out the rocket attack.

Mr Kagame vehemently denies this and says it was the work of Hutu extremists, in order to provide a pretext to carry out their well-laid plans to exterminate the Tutsi community.

Whoever was responsible, within hours a campaign of violence spread from the capital throughout the country, and did not subside until three months later.

But the death of the president was by no means the only cause of Africa's largest genocide in modern times.

History of violence

Ethnic tension in Rwanda is nothing new. There have always been disagreements between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis, but the animosity between them has grown substantially since the colonial period.

The two ethnic groups are actually very similar - they speak the same language, inhabit the same areas and follow the same traditions.

However, Tutsis are often taller and thinner than Hutus, with some saying their origins lie in Ethiopia.

During the genocide, the bodies of Tutsis were thrown into rivers, with their killers saying they were being sent back to Ethiopia.

When the Belgian colonists arrived in 1916, they produced identity cards classifying people according to their ethnicity.

The Belgians considered the Tutsis to be superior to the Hutus. Not surprisingly, the Tutsis welcomed this idea, and for the next 20 years they enjoyed better jobs and educational opportunities than their neighbours.

Resentment among the Hutus gradually built up, culminating in a series of riots in 1959. More than 20,000 Tutsis were killed, and many more fled to the neighbouring countries of Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda.

When Belgium relinquished power and granted Rwanda independence in 1962, the Hutus took their place. Over subsequent decades, the Tutsis were portrayed as the scapegoats for every crisis.

Building up to genocide

This was still the case in the years before the genocide. The economic situation worsened and the incumbent president, Juvenal Habyarimana, began losing popularity.

At the same time, Tutsi refugees in Uganda - supported by some moderate Hutus - were forming the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), led by Mr Kagame. Their aim was to overthrow Habyarimana and secure their right to return to their homeland.

Habyarimana chose to exploit this threat as a way to bring dissident Hutus back to his side, and Tutsis inside Rwanda were accused of being RPF collaborators.

In August 1993, after several attacks and months of negotiation, a peace accord was signed between Habyarimana and the RPF, but it did little to stop the continued unrest.

When Habyarimana's plane was shot down at the beginning of April 1994, it was the final nail in the coffin.

Exactly who killed the president - and with him the president of Burundi and many chief members of staff - has not been established.

Whoever was behind the killing its effect was both instantaneous and catastrophic.

Mass murder

In Kigali, the presidential guard immediately initiated a campaign of retribution. Leaders of the political opposition were murdered, and almost immediately, the slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus began.

Within hours, recruits were dispatched all over the country to carry out a wave of slaughter.

The early organisers included military officials, politicians and businessmen, but soon many others joined in the mayhem.

Organised gangs of government soldiers and militias hacked their way through the Tutsi population with machetes, or blew them up in churches where they had taken refuge.

The extremist ethnic Hutu regime in office in 1994 appeared genuinely to believe that the only way it could hang on to power was by wiping out the ethnic Tutsis completely.

Encouraged by the presidential guard and radio propaganda, an unofficial militia group called the Interahamwe (meaning those who attack together) was mobilised. At its peak, this group was 30,000-strong.

Soldiers and police officers encouraged ordinary citizens to take part. In some cases, Hutu civilians were forced to murder their Tutsi neighbours by military personnel.

Participants were often given incentives, such as money or food, and some were even told they could appropriate the land of the Tutsis they killed.

On the ground at least, the Rwandans were largely left alone by the international community. Most of the UN troops withdrew after the murder of 10 soldiers.

The day after Habyarimana's death, the RPF renewed their assault on government forces, and numerous attempts by the UN to negotiate a ceasefire came to nothing.

Aftermath

Finally, in July, the RPF captured Kigali. The government collapsed and the RPF declared a ceasefire.

As soon as it became apparent that the RPF was victorious, an estimated two million Hutus fled to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).

These refugees include many who have since been implicated in the massacres.

At first, a multi-ethnic government was set up, with a Hutu, Pasteur Bizimungu as president and Mr Kagame as his deputy.

But the pair later fell out and Bizimungu was jailed on charges of inciting ethnic violence, while Mr Kagame became president.

Although the killing in Rwanda was over, the presence of Hutu militias in DR Congo has led to years of conflict there, causing up to five million deaths.

Rwanda's now Tutsi-led government has twice invaded its much larger neighbour, saying it wants to wipe out the Hutu forces.

And a Congolese Tutsi rebel group remains active, refusing to lay down arms, saying otherwise its community would be at risk of genocide.

The world's largest peacekeeping force has been unable to end the fighting.

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

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In just three months, an estimated 800,000 people were massacred in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. BBC News Online examines the causes.

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In just 100 days in 1994, about 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda by ethnic Hutu extremists. They were targeting members of the minority Tutsi community, as well as their political opponents, irrespective of their ethnic origin.

Warning: Contains graphic images.

How did the genocide start?

About 85% of Rwandans are Hutus but the Tutsi minority has long dominated the country. In 1959, the Hutus overthrew the Tutsi monarchy and tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to neighbouring countries, including Uganda.

A group of Tutsi exiles formed a rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which invaded Rwanda in 1990 and fighting continued until a 1993 peace deal was agreed.

On the night of 6 April 1994 a plane carrying then-President Juvenal Habyarimana, and his counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi - both Hutus - was shot down, killing everyone on board.

Hutu extremists blamed the RPF and immediately started a well-organised campaign of slaughter. The RPF said the plane had been shot down by Hutus to provide an excuse for the genocide.

With meticulous organisation. Lists of government opponents were handed out to militias who went and killed them, along with all of their families.

Neighbours killed neighbours and some husbands even killed their Tutsi wives, saying they would be killed if they refused.

At the time, ID cards had people's ethnic group on them, so militias set up roadblocks where Tutsis were slaughtered, often with machetes which most Rwandans kept around the house.

Thousands of Tutsi women were taken away and kept as sex slaves.

Why was it so vicious?

Rwanda has always been a tightly controlled society, organised like a pyramid from each district up to the top of government. The then-governing party, MRND, had a youth wing called the Interahamwe, which was turned into a militia to carry out the slaughter.

Weapons and hit-lists were handed out to local groups, who knew exactly where to find their targets.

The Hutu extremists set up a radio station, RTLM, and newspapers which circulated hate propaganda, urging people to "weed out the cockroaches" meaning kill the Tutsis. The names of prominent people to be killed were read out on radio.

Even priests and nuns have been convicted of killing people, including some who sought shelter in churches.

By the end of the 100-day killing spree, around 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus had been killed.

The UN and Belgium had forces in Rwanda but the UN mission was not given a mandate to stop the killing.

A year after US troops were killed in Somalia, the US was determined not to get involved in another African conflict. The Belgians and most UN peacekeepers pulled out after 10 Belgian soldiers were killed.

The French, who were allies of the Hutu government, sent a special force to evacuate their citizens and later set up a supposedly safe zone but were accused of not doing enough to stop the slaughter in that area.

Paul Kagame, Rwanda's current president, has accused France of backing those who carried out the massacres - a charge denied by Paris.

How did it end?

The well-organised RPF, backed by Uganda's army, gradually seized more territory, until 4 July 1994, when its forces marched into the capital, Kigali.

Some two million Hutus - both civilians and some of those involved in the genocide - then fled across the border into the Democratic Republic of Congo, at the time called Zaire, fearing revenge attacks. Others went to neighbouring Tanzania and Burundi.

Human rights groups say RPF fighters killed thousands of Hutu civilians as they took power - and more after they went into DR Congo to pursue the Interahamwe. The RPF denies this.

In DR Congo, thousands died from cholera, while aid groups were accused of letting much of their assistance fall into the hands of the Hutu militias.

What happened in DR Congo?

The RPF, now in power in Rwanda, embraced militias fighting both the Hutu militias and the Congolese army, which was aligned with the Hutus.

The Rwanda-backed rebel groups eventually marched on DR Congo's capital, Kinshasa, and overthrew the government of Mobutu Sese Seko, installing Laurent Kabila as president.

But the new president's reluctance to tackle Hutu militias led to a new war that dragged in six countries and led to the creation of numerous armed groups fighting for control of this mineral-rich country.

An estimated five million people died as a result of the conflict which lasted until 2003, with some armed groups active until now in the areas near Rwanda's border.

Has anyone faced justice?

Instead, the UN Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the Tanzanian town of Arusha to prosecute the ringleaders.

A total of 93 people were indicted and after lengthy and expensive trials, dozens of senior officials in the former regime were convicted of genocide - all of them Hutus.

Within Rwanda, community courts, known as gacaca, were created to speed up the prosecution of hundreds of thousands of genocide suspects awaiting trial.

Correspondents say up to 10,000 people died in prison before they could be brought to justice.

For a decade until 2012, 12,000 gacaca courts met once a week in villages across the country, often outdoors in a marketplace or under a tree, trying more than 1.2 million cases.

Their aim was to achieve truth, justice and reconciliation among Rwandans as "gacaca" means to sit down and discuss an issue.

What is Rwanda like now?

President Kagame has been hailed for transforming the tiny, devastated country he took over through policies which encouraged rapid economic growth. He has also tried to turn Rwanda into a technological hub and is very active on Twitter.

But his critics say he does not tolerate dissent and several opponents have met unexplained deaths, both in the country and abroad.

The genocide is obviously still a hugely sensitive issue in Rwanda, and it is illegal to talk about ethnicity.

The government says this is to prevent hate speech and more bloodshed but some say it prevents true reconciliation.

Charges of stirring up ethnic hatred have been levelled against some of Mr Kagame's critics, which they say is a way of sidelining them.

He won a third term in office in the most recent election in 2017 with 98.63% of the vote.

All photographs belong to the copyright holders as marked

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In just 100 days in 1994, some 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda by ethnic Hutu extremists - how did the genocide happen?

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This week marks 20 years since the start of the genocide in Rwanda, so the world has spent some time reflecting on one of the most horrifying - and most defining - events in post-Cold War history.

What may have gotten lost in all of this is what actually happened in Rwanda, a land-locked, Maryland-sized country in central Africa. Here's what you need to know about how 1 million people were systematically slaughtered, why it happened, how it changed the world, and where Rwanda stands today.

The Rwandan genocide was a systematic campaign by the Hutu ethnic majority a imed at wiping out each and every member of the minority Tutsi group. The Hutu-controlled government and allied militias slaughtered between 800,000 and one million Tutsis before a Tutsi rebel group overthrew them. Over 100,000 Hutus were also killed, including both moderate Hutus killed by Hutu extremists and those killed by Tutsis in so-called "revenge killings."

The genocide was set into motion by the death of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana. On April 6th, 1994, Habyarimana's plane was shot down by a missile of unknown origin. Government-aligned forces used (Hutu) Habyarimana's death as an excuse to begin a campaign of slaughter they had been planning for some time, and the genocide began on April 7th. It went on for about 100 days.

The story behind the Rwandan genocide begins with colonialism

The split between Hutus and Tutsis arose not as a result of religious or cultural differences, but economic ones. "Hutus" were people who farmed crops, while "Tutsis" were people who tended livestock. Most Rwandans were Hutus. Gradually, these class divisions became seen as ethnic designations.

Because cattle were more valuable than crops, the minority Tutsis became the local elite. By the time Belgium took over the land in 1917 from Germany (who took it in 1884), an ethnic Tutsi elite had been the ruling monarchy for quite some time.
The Rwandan genocide was a directed, pre-meditated attempt to eliminate an entire people
German and Belgian rule made the dividing lines between the groups sharper. This "divide and conquer" strategy meant supporting the Tutsi monarchy and requiring that all local chiefs be Tutsis, turning the Tutsis into symbols of colonial rule for the Hutu majority.

Post-independence, the resentment created by colonial divide-and-conquer bred violence. Seeing as Hutus were a large majority, they handily won the country's first elections in 1961, and the regime that followed was staunchly Hutu nationalist. Intermittent violence between Hutus and Tutsis became a feature of post-independent Rwandan

The Rwandan genocide was a pre-planned extermination campaign

The Rwandan genocide was a different class of violence altogether from what came before it. It wasn't just wartime violence; it was a directed, pre-meditated attempt to eliminate an entire people.

The Hutu government had fought a war with Ugandan-based Tutsi rebels, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), from 1990 to 1993. By early 1994 at the latest, many Hutus, including a number of important government officials, had come to the conclusion that the real problem was Rwanda's Tutsi minority. They began organizing armed paramilitary gangs and training them to prepare to wipe out Tutsi civilians.

President Habyarimana had agreed to a United Nations-enforced peace agreement with the RPF. The missile that shot down Habyarimana's plane shattered that agreement. We still don't know today whether Tutsi rebels or Hutu extremists opposed to the peace agreement fired the missile, but it quickly became irrelevant. T he Hutu ethnic supremacists saw a green light to begin their extermination campaign.

On April 7th, the killing began. Hutu militias, most infamously the government-backed Interahamwe, went city-to-city and village-to-village, slaughtering Tutsis with guns and machetes. The militias were horrifyingly efficient, using a radio station to coordinate the beginnings of the campaign around the country and to tell people where " the graves were not quite yet full." They were killing at a pace of about 8000 Tutsis per day.

There's a strong case the world could have stopped it

Unlike earlier mass killings, such as the Holocaust, the international community had advance evidence of the coming genocide. Once it launched, they had evidence of where it was going, and still did nothing.

Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, who commanded the small UN observer force tasked with implementing the peace agreement, heard the Hutus were planning genocide in January 1994. He informed the higher-ups at the UN, but wasn't permitted to act.

Even after the genocide began, and the evidence of slaughter became undeniable, the international community did nothing. The United States actively discouraged the UN Security Council from authorizing a more robust deployment.

In hindsight, there's a good chance the UN could have done something. General Dallaire believes that, with an extra 5,000 troops and a stronger UN mandate, he could have saved " hundreds of thousands." The failure to intervene, which Bill Clinton calls one of the greatest regrets of his presidency, catalyzed the modern movement in favor of humanitarian military intervention to prevent genocide. Two major Obama administration officials - Susan Rice and Samantha Power - became converted to the cause of humanitarian intervention in part due to America's inaction in Rwanda.

It ended only after Tutsi rebels defeated the government

The day after the genocide began, the Tutsi rebel group RPF, led by Paul Kagame, launched an offensive aimed at toppling the Rwandan government. In about one hundred days, the RPF defeated the government forces. Kagame, a Tutsi, became the country's leader in all but name: a Hutu was technically made president while Kagame was vice president, but Kagame controlled the army.
Sadly, there's no reason to stop worrying about Rwanda even 20 years after the genocide
Though the RPF stopped the genocide from reaching its completion, their victory was hardly clean. A Human Rights Watch assessment of the campaign concluded that "systematic" RPF killings claimed tens of thousands of Hutu lives. These "revenge killings" by oppressed are sadly common after episodes of mass killing, and one reason why the lack of international peacekeeping forces can be so devastating.

Moreover, the aftershocks of the Rwandan genocide contributed to the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). That war, the deadliest since World War 2, was sparked in part by 2 million Hutus fleeing Rwanda attacking Tutsis. Some of the 2 million were militiamen, who attacked Tutsis in the DRC. The Kagame government supported local Tutsi forces, and the conflict escalated.

Rwanda today is a much better place, but still suffers from authoritarianism and violence

Today, Kagame still runs Rwanda - he's officially been president since 2000. His record has been extraordinarily mixed; he's done an incredible job helping rebuild life in Rwanda since the genocide, but he's also sponsored violence around the region, killed political dissidents, and consolidated authoritarian power.

Start with the good. Rwanda's life expectancy has doubled in the past decade, and child mortality and HIV rates have plummeted. The Rwandan economy has grown at a staggeringly high 8 percent rate since 2008, making it, by one assessment, the most desirable African country to invest in.

However, Kagame's government is described by his critics as an ethnic autocracy. Tutsis (who make up 10 percent of the government) staff most official positions, especially in the military. Kagame has supported murderous foreign militias, like the M23 in the DRC, and may have been complicit in revenge killings.

Perhaps most ominously, a statistical assessment of the risk of state-led mass killing puts Rwanda in the top 15 percent of countries most likely to see mass killing. Sadly, there's no reason to stop worrying about Rwanda even 20 years after the genocide.

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What you need to know about the Rwandan genocide

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This week marks 20 years since the start of the genocide in Rwanda, so the world has spent some time reflecting on one of the most horrifying - and most defining - events in post-Cold War history. What may have gotten lost in all of this is what actually happened in Rwanda, a land-locked, Maryland-sized country in central Africa.

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It ended by Tutsi going against the Rwandan government.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This week marks 20 years since the start of the genocide in Rwanda, so the world has spent some time reflecting on one of the most horrifying - and most defining - events in post-Cold War history.

What may have gotten lost in all of this is what actually happened in Rwanda, a land-locked, Maryland-sized country in central Africa. Here's what you need to know about how 1 million people were systematically slaughtered, why it happened, how it changed the world, and where Rwanda stands today.

The Rwandan genocide was a systematic campaign by the Hutu ethnic majority a imed at wiping out each and every member of the minority Tutsi group. The Hutu-controlled government and allied militias slaughtered between 800,000 and one million Tutsis before a Tutsi rebel group overthrew them. Over 100,000 Hutus were also killed, including both moderate Hutus killed by Hutu extremists and those killed by Tutsis in so-called "revenge killings."

The genocide was set into motion by the death of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana. On April 6th, 1994, Habyarimana's plane was shot down by a missile of unknown origin. Government-aligned forces used (Hutu) Habyarimana's death as an excuse to begin a campaign of slaughter they had been planning for some time, and the genocide began on April 7th. It went on for about 100 days.

The story behind the Rwandan genocide begins with colonialism

The split between Hutus and Tutsis arose not as a result of religious or cultural differences, but economic ones. "Hutus" were people who farmed crops, while "Tutsis" were people who tended livestock. Most Rwandans were Hutus. Gradually, these class divisions became seen as ethnic designations.

Because cattle were more valuable than crops, the minority Tutsis became the local elite. By the time Belgium took over the land in 1917 from Germany (who took it in 1884), an ethnic Tutsi elite had been the ruling monarchy for quite some time.
The Rwandan genocide was a directed, pre-meditated attempt to eliminate an entire people
German and Belgian rule made the dividing lines between the groups sharper. This "divide and conquer" strategy meant supporting the Tutsi monarchy and requiring that all local chiefs be Tutsis, turning the Tutsis into symbols of colonial rule for the Hutu majority.

Post-independence, the resentment created by colonial divide-and-conquer bred violence. Seeing as Hutus were a large majority, they handily won the country's first elections in 1961, and the regime that followed was staunchly Hutu nationalist. Intermittent violence between Hutus and Tutsis became a feature of post-independent Rwandan

The Rwandan genocide was a pre-planned extermination campaign

The Rwandan genocide was a different class of violence altogether from what came before it. It wasn't just wartime violence; it was a directed, pre-meditated attempt to eliminate an entire people.

The Hutu government had fought a war with Ugandan-based Tutsi rebels, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), from 1990 to 1993. By early 1994 at the latest, many Hutus, including a number of important government officials, had come to the conclusion that the real problem was Rwanda's Tutsi minority. They began organizing armed paramilitary gangs and training them to prepare to wipe out Tutsi civilians.

President Habyarimana had agreed to a United Nations-enforced peace agreement with the RPF. The missile that shot down Habyarimana's plane shattered that agreement. We still don't know today whether Tutsi rebels or Hutu extremists opposed to the peace agreement fired the missile, but it quickly became irrelevant. T he Hutu ethnic supremacists saw a green light to begin their extermination campaign.

On April 7th, the killing began. Hutu militias, most infamously the government-backed Interahamwe, went city-to-city and village-to-village, slaughtering Tutsis with guns and machetes. The militias were horrifyingly efficient, using a radio station to coordinate the beginnings of the campaign around the country and to tell people where " the graves were not quite yet full." They were killing at a pace of about 8000 Tutsis per day.

There's a strong case the world could have stopped it

Unlike earlier mass killings, such as the Holocaust, the international community had advance evidence of the coming genocide. Once it launched, they had evidence of where it was going, and still did nothing.

Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, who commanded the small UN observer force tasked with implementing the peace agreement, heard the Hutus were planning genocide in January 1994. He informed the higher-ups at the UN, but wasn't permitted to act.

Even after the genocide began, and the evidence of slaughter became undeniable, the international community did nothing. The United States actively discouraged the UN Security Council from authorizing a more robust deployment.

In hindsight, there's a good chance the UN could have done something. General Dallaire believes that, with an extra 5,000 troops and a stronger UN mandate, he could have saved " hundreds of thousands." The failure to intervene, which Bill Clinton calls one of the greatest regrets of his presidency, catalyzed the modern movement in favor of humanitarian military intervention to prevent genocide. Two major Obama administration officials - Susan Rice and Samantha Power - became converted to the cause of humanitarian intervention in part due to America's inaction in Rwanda.

It ended only after Tutsi rebels defeated the government

The day after the genocide began, the Tutsi rebel group RPF, led by Paul Kagame, launched an offensive aimed at toppling the Rwandan government. In about one hundred days, the RPF defeated the government forces. Kagame, a Tutsi, became the country's leader in all but name: a Hutu was technically made president while Kagame was vice president, but Kagame controlled the army.
Sadly, there's no reason to stop worrying about Rwanda even 20 years after the genocide
Though the RPF stopped the genocide from reaching its completion, their victory was hardly clean. A Human Rights Watch assessment of the campaign concluded that "systematic" RPF killings claimed tens of thousands of Hutu lives. These "revenge killings" by oppressed are sadly common after episodes of mass killing, and one reason why the lack of international peacekeeping forces can be so devastating.

Moreover, the aftershocks of the Rwandan genocide contributed to the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). That war, the deadliest since World War 2, was sparked in part by 2 million Hutus fleeing Rwanda attacking Tutsis. Some of the 2 million were militiamen, who attacked Tutsis in the DRC. The Kagame government supported local Tutsi forces, and the conflict escalated.

Rwanda today is a much better place, but still suffers from authoritarianism and violence

Today, Kagame still runs Rwanda - he's officially been president since 2000. His record has been extraordinarily mixed; he's done an incredible job helping rebuild life in Rwanda since the genocide, but he's also sponsored violence around the region, killed political dissidents, and consolidated authoritarian power.

Start with the good. Rwanda's life expectancy has doubled in the past decade, and child mortality and HIV rates have plummeted. The Rwandan economy has grown at a staggeringly high 8 percent rate since 2008, making it, by one assessment, the most desirable African country to invest in.

However, Kagame's government is described by his critics as an ethnic autocracy. Tutsis (who make up 10 percent of the government) staff most official positions, especially in the military. Kagame has supported murderous foreign militias, like the M23 in the DRC, and may have been complicit in revenge killings.

Perhaps most ominously, a statistical assessment of the risk of state-led mass killing puts Rwanda in the top 15 percent of countries most likely to see mass killing. Sadly, there's no reason to stop worrying about Rwanda even 20 years after the genocide.

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What you need to know about the Rwandan genocide

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This week marks 20 years since the start of the genocide in Rwanda, so the world has spent some time reflecting on one of the most horrifying - and most defining - events in post-Cold War history. What may have gotten lost in all of this is what actually happened in Rwanda, a land-locked, Maryland-sized country in central Africa.

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The Rwandan Civil War was a self Rwandan war between the two sides of Tutsis and Hutus. - Chris L

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In the early 1990's; "President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, began using anti-Tutsi rhetoric to consolidate his power among the Hutus."

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On April 7, 1994, violence fuels the launch of what would become the worst episode of genocide since World War II: the massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Following the first wave of massacres, Rwandan forces manage to discourage international intervention with the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers. The Tutsis, a minority group that made up about 10 percent of Rwanda's population, received no assistance from the international community, although the United Nations later conceded that a mere 5,000 soldiers deployed at the outset would have stopped the wholesale slaughter.

The immediate roots of the 1994 genocide dated back to the early 1990s, when President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, began using anti-Tutsi rhetoric to consolidate his power among the Hutus. Beginning in October 1990, there were several massacres of hundreds of Tutsis. Although the two ethnic groups were very similar, sharing the same language and culture for centuries, the law required registration based on ethnicity. The government and army began to assemble the Interahamwe (meaning "those who attack together") and prepared for the elimination of the Tutsis by arming Hutus with guns and machetes. In January 1994, the United Nations forces in Rwanda warned that larger massacres were imminent.

On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down. It is not known if the attack was carried out by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi military organization stationed outside the country at the time, or by Hutu extremists trying to instigate a mass killing. In any event, Hutu extremists in the military, led by Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, immediately went into action, murdering Tutsis and moderate Hutus within hours of the crash.

The Belgian peacekeepers were killed the next day, a key factor in the withdrawal of U.N. forces from Rwanda. Soon afterward, the radio stations in Rwanda were broadcasting appeals to the Hutu majority to kill all Tutsis in the country. The army and the national police directed the slaughter, sometimes threatening Hutu civilians when persuasion didn't work. Thousands of innocent people were hacked to death with machetes by their neighbors. Despite the horrific crimes, the international community, including the United States, hesitated to take any action. They wrongly ascribed the genocide to chaos amid tribal war. President Bill Clinton later called America's failure to do anything to stop the genocide "the biggest regret" of his administration.

It was left to the RPF, led by Paul Kagame, to begin an ultimately successful military campaign for control of Rwanda. By the summer, the RPF had defeated the Hutu forces and driven them out of the country and into several neighboring nations. However, by that time, an estimated 75 percent of the Tutsis living in Rwanda had been murdered.
READ MORE: The Rwandan Genocide

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Violence erupts in Rwanda, foreshadowing genocide

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On April 7, 1994, violence fuels the launch of what would become the worst episode of genocide since World War II: the massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Following the first wave of massacres, Rwandan forces manage to discourage international intervention with the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers.

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it kinda started by the death of the Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana,when his plane was shot down above Kigali airport on 6 April 1994.

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Between April and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days.

Most of the dead were Tutsis - and most of those who perpetrated the violence were Hutus.

Even for a country with such a turbulent history as Rwanda, the scale and speed of the slaughter left its people reeling.

The genocide was sparked by the death of the Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, when his plane was shot down above Kigali airport on 6 April 1994.

A French judge has blamed current Rwandan President, Paul Kagame - at the time the leader of a Tutsi rebel group - and some of his close associates for carrying out the rocket attack.

Mr Kagame vehemently denies this and says it was the work of Hutu extremists, in order to provide a pretext to carry out their well-laid plans to exterminate the Tutsi community.

Whoever was responsible, within hours a campaign of violence spread from the capital throughout the country, and did not subside until three months later.

But the death of the president was by no means the only cause of Africa's largest genocide in modern times.

History of violence

Ethnic tension in Rwanda is nothing new. There have always been disagreements between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis, but the animosity between them has grown substantially since the colonial period.

The two ethnic groups are actually very similar - they speak the same language, inhabit the same areas and follow the same traditions.

However, Tutsis are often taller and thinner than Hutus, with some saying their origins lie in Ethiopia.

During the genocide, the bodies of Tutsis were thrown into rivers, with their killers saying they were being sent back to Ethiopia.

When the Belgian colonists arrived in 1916, they produced identity cards classifying people according to their ethnicity.

The Belgians considered the Tutsis to be superior to the Hutus. Not surprisingly, the Tutsis welcomed this idea, and for the next 20 years they enjoyed better jobs and educational opportunities than their neighbours.

Resentment among the Hutus gradually built up, culminating in a series of riots in 1959. More than 20,000 Tutsis were killed, and many more fled to the neighbouring countries of Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda.

When Belgium relinquished power and granted Rwanda independence in 1962, the Hutus took their place. Over subsequent decades, the Tutsis were portrayed as the scapegoats for every crisis.

Building up to genocide

This was still the case in the years before the genocide. The economic situation worsened and the incumbent president, Juvenal Habyarimana, began losing popularity.

At the same time, Tutsi refugees in Uganda - supported by some moderate Hutus - were forming the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), led by Mr Kagame. Their aim was to overthrow Habyarimana and secure their right to return to their homeland.

Habyarimana chose to exploit this threat as a way to bring dissident Hutus back to his side, and Tutsis inside Rwanda were accused of being RPF collaborators.

In August 1993, after several attacks and months of negotiation, a peace accord was signed between Habyarimana and the RPF, but it did little to stop the continued unrest.

When Habyarimana's plane was shot down at the beginning of April 1994, it was the final nail in the coffin.

Exactly who killed the president - and with him the president of Burundi and many chief members of staff - has not been established.

Whoever was behind the killing its effect was both instantaneous and catastrophic.

Mass murder

In Kigali, the presidential guard immediately initiated a campaign of retribution. Leaders of the political opposition were murdered, and almost immediately, the slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus began.

Within hours, recruits were dispatched all over the country to carry out a wave of slaughter.

The early organisers included military officials, politicians and businessmen, but soon many others joined in the mayhem.

Organised gangs of government soldiers and militias hacked their way through the Tutsi population with machetes, or blew them up in churches where they had taken refuge.

The extremist ethnic Hutu regime in office in 1994 appeared genuinely to believe that the only way it could hang on to power was by wiping out the ethnic Tutsis completely.

Encouraged by the presidential guard and radio propaganda, an unofficial militia group called the Interahamwe (meaning those who attack together) was mobilised. At its peak, this group was 30,000-strong.

Soldiers and police officers encouraged ordinary citizens to take part. In some cases, Hutu civilians were forced to murder their Tutsi neighbours by military personnel.

Participants were often given incentives, such as money or food, and some were even told they could appropriate the land of the Tutsis they killed.

On the ground at least, the Rwandans were largely left alone by the international community. Most of the UN troops withdrew after the murder of 10 soldiers.

The day after Habyarimana's death, the RPF renewed their assault on government forces, and numerous attempts by the UN to negotiate a ceasefire came to nothing.

Aftermath

Finally, in July, the RPF captured Kigali. The government collapsed and the RPF declared a ceasefire.

As soon as it became apparent that the RPF was victorious, an estimated two million Hutus fled to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).

These refugees include many who have since been implicated in the massacres.

At first, a multi-ethnic government was set up, with a Hutu, Pasteur Bizimungu as president and Mr Kagame as his deputy.

But the pair later fell out and Bizimungu was jailed on charges of inciting ethnic violence, while Mr Kagame became president.

Although the killing in Rwanda was over, the presence of Hutu militias in DR Congo has led to years of conflict there, causing up to five million deaths.

Rwanda's now Tutsi-led government has twice invaded its much larger neighbour, saying it wants to wipe out the Hutu forces.

And a Congolese Tutsi rebel group remains active, refusing to lay down arms, saying otherwise its community would be at risk of genocide.

The world's largest peacekeeping force has been unable to end the fighting.

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

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In just three months, an estimated 800,000 people were massacred in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. BBC News Online examines the causes.

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The Rwandan government began the long-awaited genocide trials at the end of 1996. The delay was due to the fact that the country had lost most of its judicial personnel, not to mention the destruction to courts, jails and other infrastructure. By 2000, there were over 100,000 genocide suspects awaiting trial.

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On 6 April 1994, the airplane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Hutu president of Burundi, was shot down as it prepared to land in Kigali, killing everyone on board. Responsibility for the attack was disputed, with both the RPF and Hutu extremists being blamed.

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The Rwandan genocide occurred between 7 April and 15 July 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War. During this period of around 100 days, members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu and Twa, were slaughtered by armed militias. The most widely accepted scholarly estimates are around 500,000 to 800,000 Tutsi deaths.

In 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group composed mostly of Tutsi refugees, invaded northern Rwanda from their base in Uganda, initiating the Rwandan Civil War. Neither side was able to gain a decisive advantage in the war, and the Rwandan government led by President Juvénal Habyarimana signed the Arusha Accords with the RPF on 4 August 1993. Many historians argue that genocide against the Tutsi had been planned for a few years. However, Habyarimana's assassination on 6 April 1994 created a power vacuum and ended peace accords. Genocidal killings began the following day when soldiers, police, and militia executed key Tutsi and moderate Hutu military and political leaders.

The scale and brutality of the genocide caused shock worldwide, but no country intervened to forcefully stop the killings. Most of the victims were killed in their own villages or towns, many by their neighbors and fellow villagers. Hutu gangs searched out victims hiding in churches and school buildings. The militia murdered victims with machetes and rifles. Sexual violence was rife, with an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 women raped during the genocide. The RPF quickly resumed the civil war once the genocide started and captured all government territory, ending the genocide and forcing the government and génocidaires into Zaire.

The genocide had lasting and profound effects. In 1996, the RPF-led Rwandan government launched an offensive into Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), home to exiled leaders of the former Rwandan government and many Hutu refugees, starting the First Congo War and killing an estimated 200,000 people. Today, Rwanda has two public holidays to mourn the genocide, and " genocide ideology" and "divisionism" are criminal offences. International Day of Reflection on the Rwandan genocide is observed globally on 7 April every year. Although the Constitution of Rwanda claims that more than 1 million people perished in the genocide, according to Jens Meierhenrich, the real number killed is substantially lower.

Background

Pre-independent Rwanda and the origins of Hutu, Tutsi and Twa groups

The earliest inhabitants of what is now Rwanda were the Twa, a group of aboriginal pygmy hunter-gatherers who settled in the area between 8000 BC and 3000 BC and remain in Rwanda today. Between 700 BC and 1500 AD, a number of Bantu groups migrated into Rwanda, and began to clear forest land for agriculture. Historians have several theories regarding the nature of the Bantu migrations: one theory is that the first settlers were Hutu, while the Tutsi migrated later and formed a distinct racial group, possibly of Cushitic origin. An alternative theory is that the migration was slow and steady from neighbouring regions, with incoming groups bearing high genetic similarity to the established ones, and integrating into rather than conquering the existing society. Under this theory, the Hutu and Tutsi distinction arose later and was not a racial one, but principally a class or caste distinction in which the Tutsi herded cattle while the Hutu farmed the land. The Hutu, Tutsi and Twa of Rwanda share a common language and are collectively known as the Banyarwanda.

The population coalesced, first into clans ( ubwoko), and then, by 1700, into around eight kingdoms. The Kingdom of Rwanda, ruled by the Tutsi Nyiginya clan, became the dominant kingdom from the mid-eighteenth century, expanding through a process of conquest and assimilation, and achieving its greatest extent under the reign of King Kigeli Rwabugiri in 1853-1895. Rwabugiri expanded the kingdom west and north, and initiated administrative reforms which caused a rift to grow between the Hutu and Tutsi populations. These included uburetwa, a system of forced labour which Hutu had to perform to regain access to land seized from them, and , under which Tutsi patrons ceded cattle to Hutu or Tutsi clients in exchange for economic and personal service.

Rwanda had some eighteen clans defined primarily along lines of kinship. The terms Hutu and Tutsi were already in use prior to colonial rule, but they referred to individuals rather than to groups, and the distinction between them was based on lineage rather than ethnicity; one could move from one status to another depending on wealth or marriage. Although Hutu and Tutsi were often treated differently, they shared the same language and culture; the same clan names; same customs; and the symbols of kingship served as a unifying bond between them.

Rwanda and neighbouring Burundi were assigned to Germany by the Berlin Conference of 1884, and Germany established a presence in the country in 1897 with the formation of an alliance with the king. German policy was to rule the country through the Rwandan monarchy; this system had the added benefit of enabling colonization with small European troop numbers. The colonists favoured the Tutsi over the Hutu when assigning administrative roles, believing them to be migrants from Ethiopia and racially superior. The Rwandan king welcomed the Germans, using their military strength to widen his rule. Belgian forces took control of Rwanda and Burundi in 1917 during World War I, and from 1926 began a policy of more direct colonial rule. The Belgians modernised the Rwandan economy, but Tutsi supremacy remained, leaving the Hutu disenfranchised.

In the early 1930s, Belgium introduced a permanent division of the population by classifying Rwandans into three ethnic (ethno-racial) groups, with the Hutu representing about 84% of the populace, Tutsi about 15%, and Twa about 1% of the population. Compulsory identity cards were issued labeling (in the rubric for 'ethnicity and race') each individual as either Tutsi, Hutu, Twa, or Naturalised. While it had previously been possible for particularly wealthy Hutus to become honorary Tutsis, the identity cards prevented any further movement between the groups and made socio-economic groups into rigid ethnic groups.

The ethnic identities of the Hutu and Tutsi were reshaped and mythologized by the colonizers. Christian missionaries promoted the theory about the "Hamitic" origins of the kingdom, and referred to the distinctively Ethiopian features and hence, foreign origins, of the Tutsi "caste". These mythologies provide the basis for anti-Tutsi propaganda in 1994.

Revolution and Hutu-Tutsi relations after independence

After World War II, a Hutu emancipation movement began to grow in Rwanda, fuelled by increasing resentment of the inter-war social reforms, and also an increasing sympathy for the Hutu within the Catholic Church. Catholic missionaries increasingly viewed themselves as responsible for empowering the underprivileged Hutu rather than the Tutsi elite, leading rapidly to the formation of a sizeable Hutu clergy and educated elite that provided a new counterbalance to the established political order. The monarchy and prominent Tutsis sensed the growing influence of the Hutu and began to agitate for immediate independence on their own terms. In 1957, a group of Hutu scholars wrote the " Bahutu Manifesto". This was the first document to label the Tutsi and Hutu as separate races, and called for the transfer of power from Tutsi to Hutu based on what it termed "statistical law".

On 1 November 1959 Dominique Mbonyumutwa, a Hutu sub-chief, was attacked close to his home in Byimana, Gitarama prefecture, by supporters of the pro-Tutsi party. Mbonyumutwa survived, but rumours began spreading that he had been killed. Hutu activists responded by killing Tutsis, both the elite and ordinary civilians, marking the beginning of the Rwandan Revolution. The Tutsi responded with attacks of their own, but by this stage the Hutu had full backing from the Belgian administration who wanted to overturn the Tutsi domination. In early 1960, the Belgians replaced most Tutsi chiefs with Hutu and organised mid-year commune elections which returned an overwhelming Hutu majority. The king was deposed, a Hutu-dominated republic created, and the country became independent in 1962. As the revolution progressed, Tutsis began leaving the country to escape the Hutu purges, settling in the four neighbouring countries: Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania and Zaire. These exiles, unlike the Banyarwanda who migrated during the pre-colonial and colonial era, were regarded as refugees in their host countries, and began almost immediately to agitate for a return to Rwanda. They formed armed groups who launched attacks into Rwanda; these were largely unsuccessful, and led to further reprisal killings of 10,000 Tutsis and further Tutsi exiles. By 1964, more than 300,000 Tutsis had fled, and were forced to remain in exile for the next three decades.

Grégoire Kayibanda presided over a Hutu republic for the next decade, imposing an autocratic rule similar to the pre-revolution feudal monarchy. He was overthrown following a coup in 1973, which brought President Juvénal Habyarimana to power. Pro-Hutu and Anti-Tutsi discrimination continued in Rwanda itself, although the indiscriminate violence against the Tutsi did decrease somewhat. Habyarimana founded the National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development (MRND) party in 1975, and promulgated a new constitution following a 1978 referendum, making the country a one-party state in which every citizen had to belong to the MRND.

At 408 inhabitants per square kilometre (1,060/sq mi), Rwanda's population density is among the highest in Africa. Rwanda's population had increased from 1.6 million people in 1934 to 7.1 million in 1989, leading to competition for land. Historians such as Gérard Prunier believe that the 1994 genocide can be partly attributed to population density.

Rwandan Civil War

In the 1980s, a group of 500 Rwandan refugees in Uganda, led by Fred Rwigyema, fought with the rebel National Resistance Army (NRA) in the Ugandan Bush War, which saw Yoweri Museveni overthrow Milton Obote. These soldiers remained in the Ugandan army following Museveni's inauguration as Ugandan president, but simultaneously began planning an invasion of Rwanda through a covert network within the army's ranks. In October 1990, Rwigyema led a force of over 4,000 rebels from Uganda, advancing 60 km (37 mi) into Rwanda under the banner of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Rwigyema was killed on the third day of the attack, and France and Zaire deployed forces in support of the Rwandan army, allowing them to repel the invasion. Rwigyema's deputy, Paul Kagame, took command of the RPF forces, organising a tactical retreat through Uganda to the Virunga Mountains, a rugged area of northern Rwanda. From there, he rearmed and reorganised the army, and carried out fundraising and recruitment from the Tutsi diaspora.

Kagame restarted the war in January 1991, with a surprise attack on the northern town of Ruhengeri. The RPF captured the town, benefiting from the element of surprise, and held it for one day before retreating to the forests. For the next year, the RPF waged a hit-and-run style guerrilla war, capturing some border areas but not making significant gains against the Rwandan army. In June 1992, following the formation of a multiparty coalition government in Kigali, the RPF announced a ceasefire and began negotiations with the Rwandan government in Arusha, Tanzania. In early 1993, several extremist Hutu groups formed and began campaigns of large scale violence against the Tutsi. The RPF responded by suspending peace talks and launching a major attack, gaining a large swathe of land across the north of the country. Peace negotiations eventually resumed in Arusha; the resulting set of agreements, known as the Arusha Accords, were signed in August 1993 and gave the RPF positions in a Broad-Based Transitional Government (BBTG) and in the national army. The United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), a peacekeeping force, arrived in the country and the RPF were given a base in the national parliament building in Kigali, for use during the setting up of the BBTG.

Hutu Power movement

In the early years of Habyarimana's regime, there was greater economic prosperity and reduced violence against Tutsis. Many hardline anti-Tutsi figures remained, however, including the family of the first lady Agathe Habyarimana, who were known as the or clan de Madame, and the president relied on them to maintain his regime. When the RPF invaded in October 1990, Habyarimana and the hardliners exploited the fear of the population to advance an anti-Tutsi agenda which became known as Hutu Power. Tutsi were increasingly viewed with suspicion. A pogrom was organised on 11 October 1990 in a commune in Gisenyi Province, killing 383 Tutsi. A group of military officers and government members founded a magazine called Kangura, which became popular throughout the country. This published anti-Tutsi propaganda, including the Hutu Ten Commandments, an explicit set of racist guidelines, including labelling Hutus who married Tutsis as "traitors". In 1992, the hardliners created the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic (CDR) party, which was linked to the ruling party but more right-wing, and promoted an agenda critical of the president's alleged "softness" with the RPF.

Following the 1992 ceasefire agreement, a number of the extremists in the Rwandan government and army began actively plotting against the president, worried about the possibility of Tutsis being included in government. Habyarimana attempted to remove the hardliners from senior army positions, but was only partially successful; akazu affiliates Augustin Ndindiliyimana and Théoneste Bagosora remained in powerful posts, providing the hardline family with a link to power. Throughout 1992, the hardliners carried out campaigns of localised killings of Tutsi, culminating in January 1993, in which extremists and local Hutu murdered around 300 people. When the RPF resumed hostilities in February 1993, it cited these killings as the primary motive, but its effect was to increase support for the extremists amongst the Hutu population.

From mid-1993, the Hutu Power movement represented a third major force in Rwandan politics, in addition to Habyarimana's government and the traditional moderate opposition. Apart from the CDR, there was no party that was exclusively part of the Power movement. Instead, almost every party was split into "moderate" and "Power" wings, with members of both camps claiming to represent the legitimate leadership of that party. Even the ruling party contained a Power wing, consisting of those who opposed Habyarimana's intention to sign a peace deal. Several radical youth militia groups emerged, attached to the Power wings of the parties; these included the Interahamwe, which was attached to the ruling party, and the CDR's Impuzamugambi. The youth militia began actively carrying out massacres across the country. The army trained the militias, sometimes in conjunction with the French, who were unaware of their true purpose.

Preparation for genocide

Many historians argue that the genocide was planned in advance of Habyarimana's assassination, although they do not agree on the precise date on which the idea of a deliberate and systematic genocide to kill every Tutsi in Rwanda was first rooted. Gerard Prunier dates it to 1992, when Habyarimana began negotiating with the RPF, while journalist Linda Melvern dates it to 1990, following the initial RPF invasion.

In 1990, the army began arming civilians with weapons such as machetes, and it began training the Hutu youth in combat, officially as a programme of "civil defence" against the RPF threat, but these weapons were later used to carry out the genocide . In particular, the Hutu Power leaders organized a paramilitary or militia force known as the Interahamwe ("those who stand together") and the Impuzamugambi ("those who have the same goal"). These groups served to provide auxiliary slaughterhouse support to the police, the gendarmerie and the regular army. These militias were primarily recruited from the vast pool of Hutu internally displaced persons driven from their homes in the North, and claimed a total member of 50,000 on the eve of genocide Rwanda also purchased large numbers of grenades and munitions from late 1990; in one deal, future UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, in his role as Egyptian foreign minister, facilitated a large sale of arms from Egypt. The Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) expanded rapidly at this time, growing from less than 10,000 troops to almost 30,000 in one year. The new recruits were often poorly disciplined; a divide grew between the elite Presidential Guard and Gendarmerie units, who were well trained and battle ready, and the ordinary rank and file, respectively.

In March 1993, Hutu Power began compiling lists of "traitors" whom they planned to kill, and it is possible that Habyarimana's name was on these lists; the CDR were publicly accusing the president of treason.

The Power groups believed that the national radio station, Radio Rwanda, had become too liberal and supportive of the opposition; they founded a new radio station, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM). The RTLM was designed to appeal to the young adults in Rwanda and had extensive reach. Unlike newspapers that could only be found in cities, the radio broadcasts were accessible to Rwanda's largely rural population of farmers. The format of the broadcasts mirrored Western-style radio talk shows that played popular music, hosted interviews, and encouraged audience participation. The broadcasters told crude jokes and used offensive language that contrasted strongly with Radio Rwanda's more formal news reports. Just 1.52% of RTLM's airtime was dedicated to news, while 66.29% of airtime featured the journalists discussing their thoughts on different subjects. As the start of the genocide approached, the RTLM broadcasts focused on anti-Tutsi propaganda. They characterized the Tutsi as a dangerous enemy who wanted to seize the political power at the expense of Hutus. By linking the Rwandan Patriotic Army with the Tutsi political party and ordinary Tutsi citizens, they classified the entire ethnic group as one homogenous threat to Rwandans. The RTLM went further than amplifying ethnic and political division; it also labeled the Tutsi as inyenzi, meaning non-human pests or cockroaches, which must be exterminated. Leading up to the genocide, there were 294 instances of the RTLM accusing the Rwandan Patriotic Army of atrocities against the Hutu, along with 252 broadcasts that call for Hutus to kill the Tutsis. One such broadcast stated, "Someone must... make them disappear for good... to wipe them from human memory... to exterminate the Tutsi from the surface of the earth." By the time the violence began, the young Hutu population had absorbed months of racist propaganda that characterized all Tutsis as dangerous enemies that must be killed before they seized control of the country. The RTLM's role in the genocide earned it the nickname "Radio Machete" as it related to their incitement to genocide. One study finds that approximately 10% of the overall violence during the Rwandan genocide can be attributed to this new radio station. However, a recent paper questions the findings of that study.

During 1993, the hardliners imported machetes on a scale far larger than what was required for agriculture, as well as other tools which could be used as weapons, such as razor blades, saws and scissors. These tools were distributed around the country, ostensibly as part of the civil defence network.

In October 1993, the President of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, who had been elected in June as the country's first ever Hutu president, was assassinated by extremist Tutsi army officers. The assassination sparked the Burundi Civil War between Burundi's Hutu and Tutsi and the Burundi genocide, with 50,000 to 100,000 people killed in the first year of war. The assassination caused shockwaves, reinforcing the notion among Hutus that the Tutsi were their enemy and could not be trusted. The CDR and the Power wings of the other parties realised they could use this situation to their advantage. The idea of a deliberate and systematic genocide, which had first been suggested in 1992 but had remained a fringe viewpoint, was now top of their agenda, and they began actively planning it. They were confident of persuading the Hutu population to carry out killings, given the public anger at Ndadaye's murder, as well as RTLM propaganda and the traditional obedience of Rwandans to authority. The Power leaders began arming the interahamwe and other militia groups with AK-47s and other weapons; previously, they had possessed only machetes and traditional hand weapons.

On 11 January 1994, General Roméo Dallaire, commander of UNAMIR, sent his "Genocide Fax" to UN Headquarters. The fax stated that Dallaire was in contact with "a top level trainer in the cadre of Interhamwe-armed [ sic] militia of MRND." The informant-now known to be Mathieu Ngirumpatse's chauffeur, Kassim Turatsinze, a.k.a. "Jean-Pierre"-claimed to have been ordered to register all Tutsi in Kigali. According to the memo, Turatsinze suspected that a genocide against the Tutsis was being planned, and he said that "in 20 minutes his personnel could kill up to 1000 Tutsis". Dallaire's request to protect the informant and his family and to raid the weapons caches he revealed was denied.

The ICTR prosecution was unable to prove that a conspiracy to commit genocide existed prior to 7 April 1994. The supposed mastermind, Théoneste Bagosora, was acquitted of that charge in 2008, although he was convicted of genocide. André Guichaoua, an expert witness for the ICTR prosecution, noted in 2010:

What the Office of the Prosecutor has consistently failed to demonstrate is the alleged existence of a "conspiracy" among the accused-presuming an association or a preexisting plan to commit genocide. This is the central argument at the core of its prosecution strategy, borrowing from the contentions initially put forth by academics and human rights defenders. With the exception of two judgements, confirmed on appeal, the Trial Chambers have uniformly found the prosecution's proof of a conspiracy wanting, regardless of the case.

Assassination of Habyarimana

On 6 April 1994, the airplane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Hutu president of Burundi, was shot down as it prepared to land in Kigali, killing everyone on board. Responsibility for the attack was disputed, with both the RPF and Hutu extremists being blamed. In 2006, an eight-year investigation by the French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière concluded that Paul Kagame had ordered the assassination. An investigation by the Rwandan government made public in 2010 blamed Hutu extremists in the Rwandan army. In January 2012, a French investigation was widely published as exonerating the RPF, but according to Filip Reyntjens, the report did not exonerate the RPF. In November 2014, Emmanuel Mughisa (also known as Emile Gafarita), a former Rwandan soldier who said he had evidence that Kagame had ordered Habyarimana's plane shot down, was abducted in Nairobi hours after he was called to testify at the French inquiry. He was reportedly "join[ing] a long list of Mr Kagame's opponents who have disappeared or died". Despite disagreements about the perpetrators, many observers believe the attack and deaths of the two Hutu presidents served as the catalyst for the genocide.

Following Habyarimana's death, on the evening of 6 April, a crisis committee was formed; it consisted of Major General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, and a number of other senior army staff officers. The committee was headed by Bagosora, despite the presence of the more senior Ndindiliyimana. Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana was legally next in the line of political succession, but the committee refused to recognise her authority. Roméo Dallaire met with the committee that night and insisted that Uwilingiyimana be placed in charge, but Bagosora refused, saying Uwilingiyimana did not "enjoy the confidence of the Rwandan people" and was "incapable of governing the nation". The committee also justified its existence as being essential to avoid uncertainty following the president's death. Bagosora sought to convince UNAMIR and the RPF that the committee was acting to contain the Presidential Guard, which he described as "out of control", and that it would abide by the Arusha agreement.

Killing of moderate leaders

UNAMIR sent an escort of ten Belgian soldiers to Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana, with the intention of transporting her to the Radio Rwanda offices to address the nation. This plan was canceled because the Presidential Guard took over the radio station shortly afterward and would not permit Uwilingiyimana to speak on air. Later in the morning, a number of soldiers and a crowd of civilians overwhelmed the Belgians guarding Uwilingiyimana, forcing them to surrender their weapons. Uwilingiyimana and her husband were killed, although their children survived by hiding behind furniture and were rescued by Senegalese UNAMIR officer Mbaye Diagne. The ten Belgians were taken to the Camp Kigali military base, where they were tortured and killed. Major Bernard Ntuyahaga, the commanding officer of the Presidential Guard unit which carried out the murders, was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment by a court in Belgium in 2007.

In addition to assassinating Uwilingiyimana, the extremists spent the night of 6-7 April moving around the houses of Kigali with lists of prominent moderate politicians and journalists, on a mission to kill them. Fatalities that evening included President of the Constitutional Court Joseph Kavaruganda, Minister of Agriculture Frederic Nzamurambaho, Parti Liberal leader Landwald Ndasingwa and his Canadian wife, and chief Arusha negotiator Boniface Ngulinzira. A few moderates survived, including prime minister-designate Faustin Twagiramungu, but the plot was largely successful. According to Dallaire, "by noon on 7 April, the moderate political leadership of Rwanda was dead or in hiding, the potential for a future moderate government utterly lost." An exception to this was the new army chief of staff, Marcel Gatsinzi; Bagosora's preferred candidate Augustin Bizimungu was rejected by the crisis committee, forcing Bagosora to agree to Gatsinzi's appointment. Gatsinzi attempted to keep the army out of the genocide, and to negotiate a ceasefire with the RPF, but he had only limited control over his troops and was replaced by the hardline Bizimungu after just ten days.

Genocidal killings began the following day. Soldiers, police, and militia quickly executed key Tutsi and moderate Hutu military and political leaders who could have assumed control in the ensuing power vacuum. Checkpoints and barricades were erected to screen all holders of the national ID card of Rwanda, which contained ethnic classifications. This enabled government forces to systematically identify and kill Tutsi.

They also recruited and pressured Hutu civilians to arm themselves with machetes, clubs, blunt objects, and other weapons and encouraged them to rape, maim, and kill their Tutsi neighbors and to destroy or steal their property. The RPF restarted its offensive soon after Habyarimana's assassination. It rapidly seized control of the northern part of the country and captured Kigali about 100 days later in mid-July, bringing an end to the genocide. During these events and in the aftermath, the United Nations (UN) and countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Belgium were criticized for their inaction and failure to strengthen the force and mandate of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) peacekeepers. In December 2017, media reported revelations that the government of France had allegedly supported the Hutu government after the genocide had begun.

Planning and organization

The large scale killing of Tutsi on the grounds of ethnicity began within a few hours of Habyarimana's death. The crisis committee, headed by Théoneste Bagosora, took power in the country following Habyarimana's death, and was the principal authority coordinating the genocide. Following the assassination of Habyarimana, Bagosora immediately began issuing orders to kill Tutsi, addressing groups of interahamwe in person in Kigali, and making telephone calls to leaders in the prefectures. Other leading organisers on a national level were defence minister Augustin Bizimana; commander of the paratroopers Aloys Ntabakuze; and the head of the Presidential Guard, Protais Mpiranya. Businessman Félicien Kabuga funded the RTLM and the Interahamwe, while Pascal Musabe and Joseph Nzirorera were responsible for coordinating the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi militia activities nationally.

Military leaders in Gisenyi prefecture, the heartland of the akazu, were initially the most organized, convening a gathering of the Interahamwe and civilian Hutus; the commanders announced the president's death, blaming the RPF, and then ordered the crowd to "begin your work" and to "spare no one", including infants. The killing spread to Ruhengeri, Kibuye, Kigali, Kibungo, Gikongoro and Cyangugu prefectures on 7 April; in each case, local officials, responding to orders from Kigali, spread rumours that the RPF had killed the president, followed by a command to kill Tutsi. The Hutu population, which had been prepared and armed during the preceding months, and maintained the Rwandan tradition of obedience to authority, carried out the orders without question. On the other hand, there are views that the genocide was not sudden, irresistible or uniformly orchestrated, but "a cascade of tipping points, and each tipping point was the outcome of local, intra-ethnic contests for dominance (among Hutu)". The protracted struggles for supremacy in local communes meant that a more determined stance from the international community would likely have prevented the worst from happening.

In Kigali, the genocide was led by the Presidential Guard, the elite unit of the army. They were assisted by the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi, who set up road blocks throughout the capital; each person passing the road block was required to show the national identity card, which included ethnicity, and any with Tutsi cards were slaughtered immediately. The militias also initiated searches of houses in the city, slaughtering Tutsi and looting their property. Tharcisse Renzaho, the prefect of Kigali-ville, played a leading role, touring the road blocks to ensure their effectiveness and using his position at the top of the Kigali provincial government to disseminate orders and dismiss officials who were not sufficiently active in the killings.

In rural areas, the local government hierarchy was also in most cases the chain of command for the execution of the genocide. The prefect of each prefecture, acting on orders from Kigali, disseminated instructions to the commune leaders ( bourgmestres), who in turn issued directions to the leaders of the sectors, cells and villages within their communes. The majority of the actual killings in the countryside were carried out by ordinary civilians, under orders from the leaders. Tutsi and Hutu lived side by side in their villages, and families all knew each other, making it easy for Hutu to identify and target their Tutsi neighbours. Gerard Prunier ascribes this mass complicity of the population to a combination of the "democratic majority" ideology, in which Hutu had been taught to regard Tutsi as dangerous enemies, the culture of unbending obedience to authority, and the duress factor-villagers who refused to carry out orders to kill were often branded as Tutsi sympathisers and they themselves killed.

There were few killings in the prefectures of Gitarama and Butare during the early phase, as the prefects of those areas were moderates opposed to the violence. The genocide began in Gitarama after the interim government relocated to the prefecture on 12 April. Butare was ruled by the only Tutsi prefect in the country, Jean-Baptiste Habyalimana. Habyalimana refused to authorise any killings in his territory, and for a while Butare became a sanctuary for Tutsi refugees from elsewhere in the country. This lasted until 18 April, when the interim government dismissed him from his post and replaced him with government loyalist Sylvain Nsabimana.

The crisis committee appointed an interim government on 8 April; using the terms of the 1991 constitution instead of the Arusha Accords, the committee designated Théodore Sindikubwabo as interim president of Rwanda, while Jean Kambanda was the new prime minister. All political parties were represented in the government, but most members were from the "Hutu Power" wings of their respective parties. The interim government was sworn in on 9 April, but relocated from Kigali to Gitarama on 12 April, ostensibly fleeing RPF's advance on the capital. The crisis committee was officially dissolved, but Bagosora and the senior officers remained the de facto rulers of the country. The government played its part in mobilising the population, giving the regime an air of legitimacy, but was effectively a puppet regime with no ability to halt the army or the Interahamwe's activities. When Roméo Dallaire visited the government's headquarters a week after its formation, he found most officials at leisure, describing their activities as "sorting out the seating plan for a meeting that was not about to convene any time soon".

Death toll and timeline

During the remainder of April and early May, the Presidential Guard, gendarmerie and the youth militia, aided by local populations, continued killing at a very high rate. The goal was to kill every Tutsi living in Rwanda and, with the exception of the advancing rebel RPF army, there was no opposition force to prevent or slow the killings. The domestic opposition had already been eliminated, and UNAMIR were expressly forbidden to use force except in self-defence. In rural areas, where Tutsi and Hutu lived side by side and families knew each other, it was easy for Hutu to identify and target their Tutsi neighbours. In urban areas, where residents were more anonymous, identification was facilitated using road blocks manned by military and interahamwe; each person passing the road block was required to show the national identity card, which included ethnicity, and any with Tutsi cards were slaughtered immediately. Many Hutu were also killed for a variety of reasons, including alleged sympathy for the moderate opposition parties, being a journalist or simply having a "Tutsi appearance". Thousands of bodies were dumped into the Kagera River, which ran along the northern border between Rwanda and Uganda and flowed into Lake Victoria. This disposal of bodies caused significant damage to the Ugandan fishing industry, as consumers refused to buy fish caught in Lake Victoria for fear that they were tainted by decomposing corpses. The Ugandan government responded by dispatching teams to retrieve the bodies from the Kagera River before they entered the lake.

The RPF was making slow but steady gains in the north and east of the country, ending the killings in each area occupied. The genocide was effectively ended during April in areas of Ruhengeri, Byumba, Kibungo and Kigali prefectures. The killings ceased during April in the akazu heartlands of western Ruhengeri and Gisenyi, as almost every Tutsi had been eliminated. Large numbers of Hutu in the RPF-conquered areas fled, fearing retribution for the genocide; 500,000 Kibungo residents walked over the bridge at Rusumo Falls, into Tanzania, in a few days at the end of April, and were accommodated in United Nations camps effectively controlled by ousted leaders of the Hutu regime, with the former prefect of Kibungo prefecture in overall control.

In the remaining prefectures, killings continued throughout May and June, although they became increasingly low-key and sporadic; most Tutsi were already dead, and the interim government wished to rein in the growing anarchy and engage the population in fighting the RPF. On 23 June, around 2,500 soldiers entered southwestern Rwanda as part of the French-led United Nations Opération Turquoise. This was intended as a humanitarian mission, but the soldiers were not able to save significant numbers of lives. The genocidal authorities were overtly welcoming of the French, displaying the French flag on their own vehicles, but slaughtering Tutsi who came out of hiding seeking protection. In July, the RPF completed their conquest of the country, with the exception of the zone occupied by Operation Turquoise. The RPF took Kigali on 4 July, and Gisenyi and the rest of the northwest on 18 July. The genocide was over, but as had occurred in Kibungo, the Hutu population fled en masse across the border, this time into Zaire, with Bagosora and the other leaders accompanying them.

The succeeding RPF government claims that 1,074,017 people were killed in the genocide, 94% of whom were Tutsi. In contrast, Human Rights Watch, following on-the-ground research, estimated the casualties at 507,000 people. According to a 2020 symposium of the Journal of Genocide Research, the official figure is not credible as it overestimates the number of Tutsi in Rwanda prior to the genocide. Using different methodologies, the scholars in the symposium estimated 500,000 to 600,000 deaths in the genocide-around two-thirds of the Tutsis in Rwanda at the time. Thousands of widows, many of whom were subjected to rape, are HIV-positive. There were about 400,000 orphans and nearly 85,000 of them were forced to become heads of families. An estimated 2,000,000 Rwandans, mostly Hutu, were displaced and became refugees. Additionally, 30% of the Pygmy Batwa were killed.

Means of killing

On 9 April, UN observers witnessed the massacre of children at a Polish church in Gikondo. The same day, 1,000 heavily armed and well trained European troops arrived to escort European civilian personnel out of the country. The troops did not stay to assist UNAMIR.[citation needed ] Media coverage picked up on the 9th, as The Washington Post reported the execution of Rwandan employees of relief agencies in front of their expatriate colleagues.

Most of the victims were killed in their own villages or in towns, often by their neighbors and fellow villagers. The militia typically murdered victims with machetes, although some army units used rifles. The Hutu gangs searched out victims hiding in churches and school buildings, and massacred them. Local officials and government-sponsored radio incited ordinary citizens to kill their neighbors, and those who refused to kill were often murdered on the spot: "Either you took part in the massacres or you were massacred yourself."

One such massacre occurred at Nyarubuye. On 12 April, more than 1,500 Tutsis sought refuge in a Catholic church in Nyange, then in Kivumu commune. Local Interahamwe, acting in concert with the authorities, used bulldozers to knock down the church building. The militia used machetes and rifles to kill every person who tried to escape. Local priest Athanase Seromba was later found guilty and sentenced to life in prison by the ICTR for his role in the demolition of his church; he was convicted of the crime of genocide and crimes against humanity. In another case, thousands sought refuge in the Official Technical School ( École technique officielle) in Kigali where Belgian UNAMIR soldiers were stationed. On 11 April, the Belgian soldiers withdrew, and Rwandan armed forces and militia killed all the Tutsi.

Several individuals attempted to halt the Rwandan genocide, or to shelter vulnerable Tutsi. Among them were

Roméo Dallaire (Canadian Lieutenant-General of UNAMIR)

Henry Kwami Anyidoho (Ghanaian Deputy Commander of UNAMIR)

Pierantonio Costa (Italian diplomat who saved many lives)

Antonia Locatelli (Italian volunteer who in 1992, two years before the actual genocide, tried to save 300 or 400 Tutsis by calling officials in the international community and was later murdered by the Interahamwe)

Jacqueline Mukansonera (Hutu woman who saved a Tutsi during the genocide)

Zura Karuhimbi (Hutu elderly widow who sheltered more than 100 refugees in her village home, posing as a witch to repel and frighten militiamen)

Paul Rusesabagina (the Academy Award nominated film Hotel Rwanda is based on his story)

Carl Wilkens (the only American who chose to remain in Rwanda during the genocide)

André Sibomana (Hutu priest and journalist who saved many lives)

Captain Mbaye Diagne (Senegalese army officer of UNAMIR who saved many lives before he was killed).

Sexual violence

Rape was used as a tool by the Interahamwe, the chief perpetrators, to separate the consciously heterogeneous population and to drastically exhaust the opposing group. The use of propaganda played an important role in both the genocide and the gender specific violence. The Hutu propaganda depicted Tutsi women as "a sexually seductive ' fifth column' in league with the Hutus' enemies". The exceptional brutality of the sexual violence, as well as the complicity of Hutu women in the attacks, suggests that the use of propaganda had been effective in the exploitation of gendered needs which had mobilized both females and males to participate. Soldiers of the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda and the Rwandan Defence Forces, including the Presidential Guard, and civilians also committed rape against mostly Tutsi women. Although Tutsi women were the main targets, moderate Hutu women were also raped.

Along with the Hutu moderates, Hutu women who were married to or who hid Tutsis were also targeted. In his 1996 report on Rwanda, the UN Special Rapporteur Rene Degni-Segui stated, "Rape was the rule and its absence was the exception." He also noted, "Rape was systematic and was used as a weapon." With this thought and using methods of force and threat, the genocidaires forced others to stand by during rapes. A testimonial by a woman of the name Marie Louise Niyobuhungiro recalled seeing local peoples, other generals and Hutu men watching her get raped about five times a day. Even when she was kept under watch of a woman, she would give no sympathy or help and furthermore forced her to farm land in between rapes.

Many of the survivors became infected with HIV from the HIV-infected men recruited by the genocidaires. During the conflict, Hutu extremists released hundreds of patients suffering from AIDS from hospitals, and formed them into "rape squads". The intent was to infect and cause a "slow, inexorable death" for their future Tutsi rape victims. Tutsi women were also targeted with the intent of destroying their reproductive capabilities. Sexual mutilation sometimes occurred after the rape and included mutilation of the vagina with machetes, knives, sharpened sticks, boiling water, and acid. Men were also the victims of sexual violation, including public mutilation of the genitals.

Some experts have estimated that between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped during the genocide.

Killing of the Twa

The pygmy people called the Batwa (or 'Twa') made up about 1% of Rwanda's population. Although the Twa were not directly targeted by the genocidaires, an estimated 10,000 of a population of 30,000 were nonetheless killed. They are sometimes referred to as the "Forgotten victims" of the Rwandan genocide. In the months leading up to the genocide, Hutu radio stations accused the Batwa of aiding the RPF and Twa survivors describe Hutu fighters as threatening to kill them all.

Rwandan Patriotic Front's military campaign and victory

On 7 April, as the genocide started, RPF commander Paul Kagame warned the crisis committee and UNAMIR that he would resume the civil war if the killing did not stop. The next day, Rwandan government forces attacked the national parliament building from several directions, but RPF troops stationed there successfully fought back. The RPF then began an attack from the north on three fronts, seeking to link up quickly with the isolated troops in Kigali. Kagame refused to talk to the interim government, believing that it was just a cover for Bagosora's rule and not committed to ending the genocide. Over the next few days, the RPF advanced steadily south, capturing Gabiro and large areas of the countryside to the north and east of Kigali. They avoided attacking the capital city Kigali or Byumba, but conducted manoeuvres designed to encircle the cities and cut off supply routes. The RPF also allowed Tutsi refugees from Uganda to settle behind the front line in the RPF controlled areas.

Throughout April, there were numerous attempts by UNAMIR to establish a ceasefire, but Kagame insisted each time that the RPF would not stop fighting unless the killings stopped. In late April, the RPF secured the whole of the Tanzanian border area and began to move west from Kibungo, to the south of Kigali. They encountered little resistance, except around Kigali and Ruhengeri. By 16 May, they had cut the road between Kigali and Gitarama, the temporary home of the interim government, and by 13 June, had taken Gitarama itself, following an unsuccessful attempt by the Rwandan government forces to reopen the road; the interim government was forced to relocate to Gisenyi in the far north west. As well as fighting the war, Kagame was recruiting heavily to expand the army. The new recruits included Tutsi survivors of the genocide and refugees from Burundi, but were less well trained and disciplined than the earlier recruits.

Having completed the encirclement of Kigali, the RPF spent the latter half of June fighting for the city itself. The government forces had superior manpower and weapons, but the RPF steadily gained territory as well as conducting raids to rescue civilians from behind enemy lines. According to Dallaire, this success was due to Kagame's being a "master of psychological warfare"; he exploited the fact that the government forces were concentrating on the genocide rather than the fight for Kigali, and capitalised on the government's loss of morale as it lost territory. The RPF finally defeated the Rwandan government forces in Kigali on 4 July, and on 18 July took Gisenyi and the rest of the northwest, forcing the interim government to flee into Zaire and finally ending the genocide. At the end of July 1994, Kagame's forces held the whole of Rwanda except for the zone in the south-west which had been occupied by a French-led United Nations force as part of Opération Turquoise.

The Liberation Day for Rwanda would come to be marked as 4 July and is commemorated as a public holiday.

Killings by the Rwandan Patriotic Front

During the genocide and in the months following the RPF victory, RPF soldiers killed many people, although the number of casualties is disputed. Alison Des Forges was one of the first researchers to conclude that RPF committed atrocities in a systematic fashion that were directed by officers with a high level of authority. She estimated that RPF killed around 30,000 people considered enemies of the Tutsi. Some witnesses blamed Kagame himself for ordering killings. After ICTR investigators reportedly discovered two layers of bodies in a mass grave in Kibuye in early 1996-one of Tutsi victims of the genocide and another left by RPF killings of Hutu civilians-further forensic investigations were prohibited by the Rwandan government. French scholar André Guichaoua charged the post-genocide government with deliberate destruction of evidence regarding killings of Hutu in order to avoid prosecution by the ICTR. Some critics have suggested that these crimes should have been prosecuted by the ICTR, or even amounted to genocide under international law. In contrast, the post-genocide regime maintains that killings by RPF soldiers were perpetrated by undisciplined recruits seeking revenge and that all such transgressions were promptly punished.

The first rumours of RPF killings emerged after 250,000 mostly Hutu refugees streamed into Tanzania at the border crossing of Rusumo on 28 April 1994. The refugees had fled before the Tutsi rebels arrived because they believed the RPF were committing atrocities. A spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) observed that "There's a lot of propaganda by the Government radio aimed at the Hutu" which "makes them feel very anti-Tutsi." After the RPF took control of the border crossing at Rusumo on 30 April, refugees continued to cross the Kagera River, ending up in remote areas of Tanzania. In early May, the UNHCR began hearing concrete accounts of atrocities and made this information public on 17 May.

After the RPF took power in Rwanda, UNHCR sent a team led by Robert Gersony to investigate the prospects for a speedy return of the nearly two million refugees that had fled Rwanda since April. After interviewing 300 people, Gersony concluded that "clearly systematic murders and persecution of the Hutu population in certain parts of the country" had taken place. Gersony's findings were suppressed by the United Nations. The Gersony Report did not technically exist because Gersony did not complete it, but a summary of an oral presentation of his findings was leaked in 2010. Gersony's personal conclusion was that between April and August 1994, the RPF had killed "between 25,000 and 45,000 persons, between 5,000 and 10,000 persons each month from April through July and 5,000 for the month of August." The new authorities categorically denied the allegations of Gersony, details of which leaked to the press. According to an RPA officer, "There was not time to do proper screening. ... We needed a force, and some of those recruited were thieves and criminals. Those people have been responsible for much of our trouble today." In an interview with journalist Stephen Kinzer, Kagame acknowledged that killings had occurred but stated that they were carried out by rogue soldiers and had been impossible to control.

The RPF killings gained international attention with the 1995 Kibeho massacre, in which soldiers opened fire on a camp for internally displaced persons in Butare prefecture. Australian soldiers serving as part of UNAMIR estimated at least 4,000 people were killed, while the Rwandan government claimed that the death toll was 338.

International involvement

United Nations

The United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda ( UNAMIR) had been in Rwanda since October 1993, with a mandate to oversee the implementation of the Arusha Accords. UNAMIR commander Roméo Dallaire learned of the Hutu Power movement during the mission's deployment, as well as plans for the mass extermination of Tutsi. He also became aware of secret weapons caches through an informant, but his request to raid them was turned down by the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), which felt that Dallaire was exceeding his mandate and had to be kept "on a leash". Seizing the weapons was argued to be squarely within UNAMIR's mandate; both sides had requested UNAMIR and it had been authorized by the UN Security Council in Resolution 872.

UNAMIR's effectiveness in peacekeeping was also hampered by President Habyarimana and Hutu hardliners, and by April 1994, the Security Council threatened to terminate UNAMIR's mandate if it did not make progress. Following the death of Habyarimana, and the start of the genocide, Dallaire liaised repeatedly with both the Crisis Committee and the RPF, attempting to re-establish peace and prevent the resumption of the civil war. Neither side was interested in a ceasefire, the government because it was controlled by the genocidaires, and the RPF because it considered it necessary to fight to stop the killings. UNAMIR's Chapter VI mandate rendered it powerless to intervene militarily, and most of its Rwandan staff were killed in the early days of the genocide, severely limiting its ability to operate.

UNAMIR was therefore largely reduced to a bystander role, and Dallaire later labelled it a "failure". Its most significant contribution was to provide refuge for thousands of Tutsi and moderate Hutu at its headquarters in Amahoro Stadium, as well as other secure UN sites, and to assist with the evacuation of foreign nationals. On 12 April, the Belgian government, which was one of the largest troop contributors to UNAMIR, and had lost ten soldiers protecting Prime Minister Uwilingiliyimana, announced that it was withdrawing, reducing the force's effectiveness even further. On 17 May 1994, the UN passed Resolution 918, which imposed an arms embargo and reinforced UNAMIR, which would be known as UNAMIR II. The new soldiers did not start arriving until June, and following the end of the genocide in July, the role of UNAMIR II was largely confined to maintaining security and stability, until its termination in 1996.

France and operation Turquoise

During President Habyarimana's years in power, France maintained close relations with him, as part of its Françafrique policy, and assisted Rwanda militarily against the RPF during the Civil War; France considered the RPF, along with Uganda, as part of a "plot" to increase Anglophone influence at the expense of French influence. During the first few days of the genocide, France launched Amaryllis, a military operation assisted by the Belgian army and UNAMIR, to evacuate expatriates from Rwanda. The French and Belgians refused to allow any Tutsi to accompany them, and those who boarded the evacuation trucks were forced off at Rwandan government checkpoints, where they were killed. The French also separated several expatriates and children from their Tutsi spouses, rescuing the foreigners but leaving the Rwandans to likely death. The French did, however, rescue several high-profile members of Habyarimana's government, as well as his wife, Agathe.

In late June 1994, France launched Opération Turquoise, a UN-mandated mission to create safe humanitarian areas for displaced persons, refugees, and civilians in danger; from bases in the Zairian cities of Goma and Bukavu, the French entered southwestern Rwanda and established the zone Turquoise, within the Cyangugu- Kibuye- Gikongoro triangle, an area occupying approximately a fifth of Rwanda. Radio France International estimates that Turquoise saved around 15,000 lives, but with the genocide coming to an end and the RPF's ascendancy, many Rwandans interpreted Turquoise as a mission to protect Hutu from the RPF, including some who had participated in the genocide. The French remained hostile to the RPF, and their presence temporarily stalled the RPF's advance.

A number of inquiries have been held into French involvement in Rwanda, including the 1998 French Parliamentary Commission on Rwanda, which accused France of errors of judgement, including "military cooperation against a background of ethnic tensions, massacres and violence", but did not accuse France of direct responsibility for the genocide itself. A 2008 report by the Rwandan government-sponsored Mucyo Commission accused the French government of knowing of preparations for the genocide and helping to train Hutu militia members. In 2019, President Macron decided to reopen the issue of French involvement in the genocide by commissioning a new team to sort through the state archives.

In April 2021, the Rwandan government announced the study they had commissioned alleged France 'did nothing' to prevent what they deemed the "foreseeable" April and May 1994 massacres in the genocide.

United States

Intelligence reports indicate that United States president Bill Clinton and his cabinet were aware before the height of the massacre that a deliberate and systematic genocide to eliminate all Tutsis was planned. However, fear of a repeat of the events in Somalia shaped US policy at the time, with many commentators identifying the graphic consequences of the Battle of Mogadishu as the key reason behind the US's failure to intervene in later conflicts such as the Rwandan genocide. After the battle, the bodies of several US casualties of the conflict were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by crowds of local civilians and members of Aidid's Somali National Alliance. According to the former US deputy special envoy to Somalia, Walter Clarke: "The ghosts of Somalia continue to haunt US policy. Our lack of response in Rwanda was a fear of getting involved in something like a Somalia all over again." President Clinton has referred to the failure of the U.S. government to intervene in the genocide as one of his main foreign policy failings, saying "I don't think we could have ended the violence, but I think we could have cut it down. And I regret it." Eighty percent of the discussion in Washington concerned the evacuation of American citizens.

Arms sales to Rwanda

In her 2004 book, Linda Melvern documented that "in the three years from October 1990, Rwanda, one of the poorest countries in the world, became the third largest importer of weapons in Africa, spending an estimated $US 112 million." She cited a significant contract with Egypt in 1992, and with France and South Africa, the next year.

Before the international embargo against Rwanda on 17 May 1994, South Africa and France were two of the main suppliers of arms to Rwanda. According to Human Rights Watch, after the embargo, they diverted their arm trade through Goma airport in Zaire. Zaire played a key role in supplying arms and facilitating arms flows to the Rwandan army. Some officials also encouraged arms trafficking by private dealers.

In 2017, according to Haaretz, Israel or Israeli private arm dealers had sold arms to the Rwandan government. Israeli officials repeatedly denied this allegation. In 2016, a petition was submitted to the Israeli Supreme Court, which ruled that the records which document Israel's arms sales, notably to Rwanda, will remain sealed, citing section nine of Israel's Freedom of Information Act which allows for non-disclosure if in releasing "the information there is a concern over harming national security, its foreign relations, the security of its public or the security or well-being of an individual."

Catholic Church

The Catholic Church affirms that genocide took place but states that those who took part in it did so without the permission of the Church. Though religious factors were not prominent, in its 1999 report Human Rights Watch faulted a number of religious authorities in Rwanda, including Catholics, Anglicans and other Protestant denominations, for failing to condemn the genocide - though that accusation was belied over time. Some in the Catholic Church's religious hierarchy have been tried and convicted for their participation in the genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Bishop Misago was accused of corruption and complicity in the genocide, but he was cleared of all charges in 2000. Many other Catholic and other clergy, however, gave their lives to protect Tutsis from slaughter.

On 20 March 2017, Pope Francis acknowledged that while some Catholic nuns and priests in the country were killed during the genocide, others were complicit in it and took part in preparing and executing the genocide.

Hutu refugees particularly entered the eastern portion of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC). Hutu genocidaires began to regroup in refugee camps along the border with Rwanda. Declaring a need to avert further genocide, the RPF-led government led military incursions into Zaire, resulting in the First (1996-97) and Second (1998-2003) Congo Wars. Armed struggles between the Rwandan government and their opponents in the DRC have continued through battles of proxy militias in the Goma region, including the M23 rebellion (2012-2013). Large Rwandan Hutu and Tutsi populations continue to live as refugees throughout the region.

Refugee crisis, insurgency, and two Congo Wars

Following the RPF victory, approximately two million Hutu fled to refugee camps in neighbouring countries, particularly Zaire, fearing RPF reprisals for the Rwandan genocide. The camps were crowded and squalid, and thousands of refugees died in disease epidemics, including cholera and dysentery. The camps were set up by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), but were effectively controlled by the army and government of the former Hutu regime, including many leaders of the genocide, who began rearming in a bid to return to power in Rwanda.

By late 1996, Hutu militants from the camps were launching regular cross-border incursions, and the RPF-led Rwandan government launched a counteroffensive. Rwanda provided troops and military training to the Banyamulenge, a Tutsi group in the Zairian South Kivu province, helping them to defeat Zairian security forces. Rwandan forces, the Banyamulenge, and other Zairian Tutsi, then attacked the refugee camps, targeting the Hutu militia. These attacks caused hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee; many returned to Rwanda despite the presence of the RPF, while others ventured further west into Zaire. The refugees fleeing further into Zaire were relentlessly pursued by the RPA under the cover of the AFDL rebellion and 232,000 Hutu refugees were killed, according to one estimate. The defeated forces of the former regime continued a cross-border insurgency campaign, supported initially by the predominantly Hutu population of Rwanda's northwestern prefectures. By 1999, a programme of propaganda and Hutu integration into the national army, succeeded in bringing the Hutu to the government side and the insurgency was defeated.

In addition to dismantling the refugee camps, Kagame began planning a war to remove long-time dictator Mobutu Sese Seko from power. Mobutu had supported the genocidaires based in the camps, and was also accused of allowing attacks on Tutsi people within Zaire. Together with Uganda, the Rwandan government supported an alliance of four rebel groups headed by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, which began waging the First Congo War in 1996. The rebels quickly took control of the North and South Kivu provinces and later advanced west, gaining territory from the poorly organised and demotivated Zairian army with little fighting, and controlling the whole country by 1997. Mobutu fled into exile, and Zaire was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). However, Rwanda fell out with the new Congolese government in 1998, and Kagame supported a fresh rebellion, leading to the Second Congo War, which would last up until 2003 and caused millions of deaths and massive damage. In 2010, a United Nations (UN) report accused the Rwandan army of committing wide-scale human rights violations and crimes against humanity in the Congo during those wars, charges denied by the Rwandan government.

Domestic situation

The infrastructure and economy of the country had suffered greatly during the genocide. Many buildings were uninhabitable, and the former regime had carried with them all currency and moveable assets when they fled the country. Human resources were also severely depleted, with over 40% of the population having been killed or fled. Many of the remainder were traumatised: most had lost relatives, witnessed killings or participated in the genocide. The long-term effects of war rape in Rwanda for the victims include social isolation, sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies and babies, with some women resorting to self-induced abortions. The army, led by Paul Kagame, maintained law and order while the government began the work of rebuilding the country's structures.

Non-governmental organisations began to move back into the country, but the international community did not provide significant assistance to the new government, and most international aid was routed to the refugee camps which had formed in Zaire following the exodus of Hutu from Rwanda. Kagame strove to portray the new government as inclusive and not Tutsi-dominated. He directed the removal of ethnicity from Rwandan citizens' national identity cards, and the government began a policy of downplaying the distinctions between Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa.

Justice system after genocide

Government institutions, including judicial courts, were destroyed, and many judges, prosecutors, and employees were murdered during the genocide. Of Rwanda's 750 judges, 506 did not remain after the genocide-many were murdered and most of the survivors fled Rwanda. By 1997, Rwanda only had 50 lawyers in its judicial system. These barriers caused the trials to proceed very slowly: with 130,000 suspects held in Rwandan prisons after the genocide, 3,343 cases were handled between 1996 and the end of 2000. Of those defendants, 20% received death sentences, 32% received life in prison, and 20% were acquitted. It was calculated that it would take over 200 years to conduct the trials of the suspects in prison-not including the ones who remained at large.

The RPF government began the long-awaited genocide trials, which had an uncertain start at the end of 1996 and inched forward in 1997. It was not until 1996 that courts finally began trials for genocide cases with the enactment of Organic Law No. 08/96 of 30 on 30 August 1996. This law initiated the prosecution of genocide crimes committed during the genocide and of crimes against humanity from October 1990. This law established the regular domestic courts as the core mechanism for responding to genocide until it was amended in 2001 to include the Gacaca courts. The Organic Law established four categories for those who were involved in the genocide, specifying the limits of punishment for members of each category. The first category was reserved those who were "planners, organizers, instigators, supervisors and leaders" of the genocide and any who used positions of state authority to promote the genocide. This category also applied to murderers who distinguished themselves on the basis of their zeal or cruelty, or who engaged in sexual torture. Members of this first category were eligible for the death sentence.

While Rwanda had the death penalty prior to the 1996 Organic law, in practice no executions had taken place since 1982. Twenty-two individuals were executed by firing squad in public executions in April 1998. After this, Rwanda conducted no further executions, though it did continue to issue death sentences until 2003. On 25 July 2007 the Organic Law Relating to the Abolition of the Death Penalty came into law, abolishing the death penalty and converting all existing death penalty sentences to life in prison under solitary confinement.

Gacaca courts

In response to the overwhelming number of potentially culpable individuals and the slow pace of the traditional judicial system, the government of Rwanda passed Organic Law No. 40/2000 in 2001. This law established Gacaca Courts at all administrative levels of Rwanda and in Kigali. It was mainly created to lessen the burden on normal courts and provide assistance in the justice system to run trials for those already in prison. The least severe cases, according to the terms of Organic Law No. 08/96 of 30, would be handled by these Gacaca Courts. With this law, the government began implementing a participatory justice system, known as Gacaca, in order to address the enormous backlog of cases. The Gacaca court system traditionally dealt with conflicts within communities, but it was adapted to deal with genocide crimes. Among the principal objectives of the courts were identification of the truth about what happened during the genocide, speeding up the process of trying genocide suspects, national unity and reconciliation, and demonstrating the capacity of the Rwandan people to resolve their own problems.

The Gacaca court system faced many controversies and challenges; they were accused of being puppets of the RPF-dominated government. The judges (known as Inyangamugayo, which means "those who detest dishonesty" in Kinyarwanda) who preside over the genocide trials were elected by the public. After election, the judges received training, but there was concern that the training was not adequate for serious legal questions or complex proceedings. Furthermore, many judges resigned after facing accusations of participating in the genocide; 27% of them were so accused. There was also a lack of defense counsel and protections for the accused, who were denied the right to appeal to ordinary courts. Most trials were open to the public, but there were issues with witness intimidation. The Gacaca courts did not try those responsible for massacres of Hutu civilians committed by members of the RPF, which controlled the Gacaca Court system.

On 18 June 2012, the Gacaca court system was officially closed after facing criticism. It is estimated that the Gacaca court system tried 1,958,634 cases during its lifetime and that 1,003,227 persons stood trial.

International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

Meanwhile, the UN established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), based in Arusha, Tanzania. The UN Tribunal tried high-level members of the government and armed forces, while Rwanda prosecuted lower-level leaders and local people.

Since the ICTR was established as an ad hoc international jurisdiction, the ICTR was scheduled to close by the end of 2014, after it would complete trials by 2009 and appeals by 2010 or 2011. Initially, the U.N. Security Council established the ICTR in 1994 with an original mandate of four years without a fixed deadline and set on addressing the crimes committed during the Rwandan genocide. As the years passed, it became apparent that the ICTR would exist long past its original mandate. With the announcement of its closing, there was a concern over how residual issues would be handled, because "The nature of criminal judicial work ... is such that it never really ends." The ICTR officially closed on 31 December 2015, and its remaining functions were handed over to the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals.

Censorship

Article 38 of the Constitution of Rwanda 2003 guarantees "the freedom of expression and freedom of access to information where it does not prejudice public order, good morals, the protection of the youth and children, the right of every citizen to honour and dignity and protection of personal and family privacy." However, in reality, this has not guaranteed freedom of speech or expression given that the government has declared many forms of speech fall into the exceptions. Under these exceptions, longtime Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, asserted that any acknowledgment of the separate people was detrimental to the unification of post-Genocide Rwanda and has created numerous laws to prevent Rwandans from promoting a "genocide ideology" and "divisionism". However, the law does not explicitly define such terms, nor does it define that one's beliefs must be spoken. For example, the law defines divisionism as 'the use of any speech, written statement, or action that divides people, that is likely to spark conflicts among people, or that causes an uprising which might degenerate into strife among people based on discrimination'. Fear of the possible ramifications from breaking these laws have caused a culture of self-censorship within the population. Both civilians and the press typically avoid anything that could be construed as critical of the government/military or promoting "divisionism".

Under the Rwandan constitution, "revisionism, negationism and trivialisation of genocide" are criminal offences. Hundreds of people have been tried and convicted for "genocide ideology", "revisionism", and other laws ostensibly related to the genocide. According to Amnesty International, of the 489 individuals convicted of "genocide revisionism and other related crimes" in 2009, five were sentenced to life imprisonment, five were sentenced to more than 20 years in jail, 99 were sentenced to 10-20 years in jail, 211 received a custodial sentence of 5-10 years, and the remaining 169 received jail terms of less than five years. Amnesty International has criticized the Rwandan government for using these laws to "criminalize legitimate dissent and criticism of the government". In 2010, Peter Erlinder, an American law professor and attorney, was arrested in Kigali and charged with genocide denial while serving as defense counsel for presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire.

The number of Tutsi survivors of the genocide has been debated. Different figures between 150,000 and 309,368 have been offered. There are a number of organizations representing and supporting these survivors of the genocide. These include the Survivors Fund, IBUKA and AVEGA. The 2007 report on the living conditions of survivors conducted by the Ministry in charge of Social Affairs in Rwanda reported the following situation of survivors in the country:

Media and popular culture

Canadian Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire became the best-known eyewitness to the genocide after co-writing the book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (2003) describing his experiences with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Dallaire's book was made into the movie Shake Hands with the Devil (2007). Former journalist and United States Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power is interviewed about the Rwandan genocide in Watchers of the Sky (2014), a documentary by Edet Belzberg about genocide throughout history and its eventual inclusion in international law.

The critically acclaimed and multiple Academy Award-nominated film Hotel Rwanda (2004) is based on the experiences of Paul Rusesabagina, a Kigali hotelier at the Hôtel des Mille Collines who sheltered over a thousand refugees during the genocide. The independent documentary film Earth Made of Glass (2010) which addresses the personal and political costs of the genocide, focusing on Rwandan President Paul Kagame and genocide survivor Jean-Pierre Sagahutu, premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival.

HBO Films released the made-for-television historical drama film titled Sometimes in April in 2005.

In 2005, Alison Des Forges wrote that eleven years after the genocide, films for popular audiences on the subject greatly increased the "widespread realization of the horror that had taken the lives of more than half a million Tutsi". In 2007, Charlie Beckett, Director of POLIS, said: "How many people saw the movie Hotel Rwanda? [It is] ironically the way that most people now relate to Rwanda."

Commemoration

Maps of Rwanda

Ethnic distribution of Tutsis in 1983. 0% Tutsi * 45.5% Tutsi

Map showing the geographical strongholds of the Rwandan political parties at the beginning of April 1994. Unknown / vacant / partyless * MRND * MDR * PSD * PL * ★ Tutsi burgomaster * ★ Unclear / complicated

1. ^ Meierhenrich, Jens (2020). "How Many Victims Were There in the Rwandan Genocide? A Statistical Debate". Journal of Genocide Research. 22 (1): 72-82. doi:10.1080/14623528.2019.1709611. S2CID 213046710. The lower bound for Tutsi deaths is 491,000 (McDoom), see page 75 mention

2. ^ Reyntjens, Filip (1997). "Estimation du nombre de personnes tuées au Rwanda en 1994". In Marysse, Stefaan; Reyntjens, Filip (eds.). L'Afrique des Grands Lacs, Annuaire 1996-1997 (PDF). L'Harmattan.

3. ^ Guichaoua, André (2 January 2020). "Counting the Rwandan Victims of War and Genocide: Concluding Reflections". Journal of Genocide Research. 22 (1): 125-141. doi:10.1080/14623528.2019.1703329. ISSN 1462-3528. S2CID 213471539.

4. ^ Sullo, Pietro (2018). "Writing History Through Criminal Law: State-Sponsored Memory in Rwanda". The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History After 1945. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 69-85. ISBN 978-1-349-95306-6.

5. ^ Yakaré-Oulé, Jansen (11 April 2014). "Denying Genocide or Denying Free Speech? A Case Study of the Application of Rwanda's Genocide Denial Laws". Northwestern Journal of Human Rights. 12 (2): 192.

6. ^ Reydams, Luc (2020). "'More than a million': the politics of accounting for the dead of the Rwandan genocide". Review of African Political Economy. 48 (168): 235-256. doi:10.1080/03056244.2020.1796320. S2CID 225356374. The government eventually settled on 'more than a million', a claim which few outside Rwanda have taken seriously.

7. ^ Tomasz Kamusella. 2021. Ethnicity and Estate: The Galician Jacquerie and the Rwandan Genocide Compared. Nationalities Papers. 5 May.

8. ^ Linden, Ian (1977). Church and Revolution in Rwanda. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

9. ^ THE PROSECUTOR VERSUS JEAN-PAUL AKAYESU Case No. ICTR-96-4-T at paras. 99-100

10. ^ Kirschke, Linda (1996). Broadcasting Genocide: Censorship, Propaganda & State-sponsored Violence in Rwanda 1990-1994. Article 19. doi:10.1163/2210-7975_HRD-2210-0154. ISBN 978-1-870798-33-4.[page needed ]

11. Kimani, Mary (2007). "RTLM: the Medium That Became a Tool for Mass Murder". In Thompson, Allan (ed.). The Media and the Rwanda Genocide. Pluto Press. pp. 110-124. doi:10.2307/j.ctt18fs550.14. ISBN 978-0-7453-2625-2. JSTOR j.ctt18fs550.14.

12. ^ Fujii, Lee Ann (April 2007). "Jean Hatzfeld. Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005/Picador, 2006. Translated by Linda Coverdale. Preface by Susan Sontag. xiv + 253 pp. Maps. Chronology of Events. Photograph. Index. $24.00. Cloth. $14.00. Paper". African Studies Review. 50 (1): 155-156. doi:10.1353/arw.2005.0101. S2CID 142781769.

13. ^ Straus, Scott (December 2007). "What Is the Relationship between Hate Radio and Violence? Rethinking Rwanda's "Radio Machete"". Politics & Society. 35 (4): 609-637. doi:10.1177/0032329207308181. S2CID 154402375.

14. ^ Yanagizawa-Drott, David (1 November 2014). "Propaganda and Conflict: Evidence from the Rwandan Genocide *". The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 129 (4): 1947-1994. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.711.8827. doi:10.1093/qje/qju020.

15. ^ Danning, Gordon (2 October 2018). "Did Radio RTLM Really Contribute Meaningfully to the Rwandan Genocide?: Using Qualitative Information to Improve Causal Inference from Measures of Media Availability". Civil Wars. 20 (4): 529-554. doi:10.1080/13698249.2018.1525677. S2CID 150075267.

16. ^ Reydams, Luc (2016). "NGO Justice: African Rights as Pseudo-Prosecutor of the Rwandan Genocide" (PDF). Human Rights Quarterly. 38 (3): 582. doi:10.1353/hrq.2016.0041. S2CID 151351680. Archived (PDF) from the original on 18 February 2019.

17. ^ Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris (5 January 2012). "Rapport d'expertise. Destruction en vol du Falcon 50 Kigali" (PDF) (in French). Archived (PDF) from the original on 10 November 2018.

18. ^ "Genocide au Rwanda: des revelations sur le rôle de la France" Archived 19 January 2019 at the Wayback Machine, Le Monde, 27 June 2017 (in French)

19. ^ Guichaoua, André (August 1998). Local government in Rwanda: Expert report prepared at the request of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (Report). Arusha: ICTR. p. 14. Record Number: 13685, Exhibit Number: P31B in ICTR-01-74.

20. ^ James, Paul (2015). "Despite the Terrors of Typologies: The Importance of Understanding Categories of Difference and Identity". Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. 17 (2): 174-95. doi:10.1080/1369801x.2014.993332. S2CID 142378403. Archived from the original on 17 October 2015.

21. ^ Straus, Scott (2006). The Order of Genocide. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 93.

22. ^ Straus, Scott (2006). The Order of Genocide. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

23. ^ Lemarchand, René (25 June 2018). "Rwanda: the state of Research | Sciences Po Violence de masse et Résistance - Réseau de recherche". www.sciencespo.fr. ISSN 1961-9898. Archived from the original on 19 November 2018.

24. ^ McDoom, Omar Shahabudin (2020). "Contested Counting: Toward a Rigorous Estimate of the Death Toll in the Rwandan Genocide" (PDF). Journal of Genocide Research. 22 (1): 83-93. doi:10.1080/14623528.2019.1703252. S2CID 214032255. If one examines the claims for the overall number killed, at the higher end lies the figure of 1,074,017 Rwandan dead. This number originates with the Rwandan government which conducted a nationwide census in July 2000, six years after the genocide. Toward the lower end lies an estimate from Human Rights Watch, one of the first organizations on the ground to investigate the genocide, of 507,000 Tutsi killed... I have estimated between 491,000 and 522,000 Tutsi, nearly two thirds of Rwanda's pre-genocide Tutsi population, were killed between 6 April and 19 July 1994. I calculated this death toll by subtracting my estimate of between 278,000 and 309,000 Tutsi survivors from my estimate of a baseline Tutsi population of almost exactly 800,000, or 10.8% of the overall population, on the eve of the genocide... In comparison with estimates at the higher and lower ends, my estimate is significantly lower than the Government of Rwanda's genocide census figure of 1,006,031 Tutsi killed. I believe this number is not credible.

25. Maximo, Dady De (2012). "A Genocide that could have been avoided". ^ New Times.

26. ^ ICTR Yearbook 1994-1996 (PDF). International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. pp. 77-78. Archived from the original (PDF) on 27 June 2003.

27. Chu, S. Ka Hon; de Brouwer, A.M. (Spring 2009). "Rwanda's Rape Victims Speak Out". Herizons. 22 (4): 16.

28. ^ Waldorf, Lars (2011). ""A Mere Pretense of Justice": Complementarity, Sham Trials, and Victor's Justice at the Rwanda Tribunal". Fordham International Law Journal. 33 (4): 1221. Archived from the original on 19 January 2019.

29. ^ Lemarchand, René (25 June 2018). "Rwanda: the state of Research | Sciences Po Violence de masse et Résistance - Réseau de recherche". www.sciencespo.fr. ISSN 1961-9898. Archived from the original on 19 November 2018. The double genocide thesis cannot be dismissed out of hand. After the publication of Judi Rever's expose of the crimes of the RPF, there appears to be considerable evidence to justify the use of the g-word to describe such atrocities.

30. ^ Gersony, Robert (10 October 1994). "Summary of UNHCR presentation before commission of experts, 10 October 1994 - Prospects for early repatriation of Rwandan refugees currently in Burundi, Tanzania and Zaïre" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 19 January 2019.

31. ^ Bakuramutsa, Manzi (29 September 1994). "Letter Dated 28 September 1994 From the Permanent Representative of Rwanda to the United Nations Addressed to the President of the Security Council". United Nations. S/1994/1115. Archived from the original on 17 January 2019. We categorically deny the following unfounded allegations made by the officials of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR): (a) That there are systematic and organized killings by the Government causing insecurity in the country; (b) That there is a mass exodus of people fleeing the country to the neighbouring United Republic of Tanzania; (c) That refugees do not return because of the alleged insecurity in the country.

32. Pogge, Thomas (2010). Politics as Usual. Polity. pp. 168-70. ISBN 978-0-7456-3892-8.

33. ^ "France 'enabled' 1994 Rwanda genocide, report says". Al Jazeera. 19 April 2021.

34. Des Forges 1999, "The Organization " The Clergy"

35. ^ "Ch. 10: "The Rwandan genocide and its aftermath"" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 25 September 2007. in State of the World's Refugees 2000, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

36. ^ Emizet, Kisangani N. F. (July 2000). "The Massacre of Refugees in Congo: A Case of UN Peacekeeping Failure and International Law". Journal of Modern African Studies. 38 (2): 163-202. doi:10.1017/S0022278X0000330X. JSTOR 161648. S2CID 154818651.

37. ^ Byman, Daniel; Chalk, Peter; Hoffman, Bruce; Rosenau, William; Brannan, David (2001). Trends in Outside Support for Insurgent Movements. Rand Corporation. p. 18. ISBN 978-0-8330-3232-4.

38. ^ United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "Rwanda". Holocaust Encyclopedia. Archived from the original on 2 December 2012.

39. "The Abolition of the Death Penalty in Rwanda". Human Rights Review. 10:99.

40. ^ "Summary of the Report Presented at the Closing of Gacaca Courts Activities". Republic of Rwanda: National Service of Gacaca Courts. Kigali, 2012

41. ^ "Organic Law No. 08/96 of 303 August on the Organization of Prosecutions for Offences Constituting the Crimes of Genocide or Crimes against Humanity Committed since 1 October 1990".

42. ^ Organic Law N° 31/2007 of 25 July 2007 Relating to the Abolition of the Death Penalty

43. ^ Amnesty International (2010). "Safer to Stay Silent: The chilling effect of Rwanda's laws on 'genocide ideology' and 'sectarianism'". p. 19. Archived from the original on 12 March 2015.

44. ^ Gibson, Kate (2010). "The Arrest of ICTR Defense Counsel Peter Erlinder in Rwanda" (PDF). ASIL Insight. 14 (25). Archived (PDF) from the original on 12 November 2013.

45. ^ "Jacqueline's Human Rights Corner". Jacqueline's Human Rights Corner. 2007. Archived from the original on 1 May 2009.

46. ^ "Camouflage and exposure" Archived 14 August 2007 at the Wayback Machine, Canadian Medical Association Journal, 29 April 2003; 168 (9)

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Shyaka, Anastase. "The Rwandan Conflict: Origin, Development, Exit Strategies" (PDF). National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, Republic of Rwanda.

Silva-Leander, Sebastian (2008). "On the Danger and Necessity of Democratisation: trade-offs between short-term stability and long-term peace in post-genocide Rwanda". Third World Quarterly. 29 (8): 1601-20. doi:10.1080/01436590802528754. S2CID 153736296.

Tiemessen, Alana Erin (2004). "After Arusha: Gacaca Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda" (PDF). African Studies Quarterly. 8 (1): 57-76. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 December 2012.

Totten, Samuel; Bartrop, Paul Robert; Jacobs, Steven L. (2008). Dictionary of Genocide, Volume 2: M-Z. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-34644-6.

Tully, L. Danielle (2003). "Human Rights Compliance and the Gacaca Jurisdictions in Rwanda". Boston College International and Comparative Law Review. 26 (2): 385-411.

Twagilimana, Aimable (2007). Historical dictionary of Rwanda. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-5313-3. OCLC 141852090.

United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (2008). "United Nations Peacekeeping Operations: Principles and Guidelines" (PDF). New York: United Nations Secretariat. Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 August 2008.

Further reading

External links

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The Rwandan genocide occurred between 7 April and 15 July 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War. During this period of around 100 days, members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu and Twa, were slaughtered by armed militias. The most widely accepted scholarly estimates are around 500,000 to 800,000 Tutsi deaths.

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the First Congo War (1996–1997),led into the Second Congo War (1998–2003)

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The Rwandan Civil War was a conflict within the Central African nation of Rwanda, between the government of President Juvénal Habyarimana and the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The conflict began on 1 October 1990 when the RPF invaded and ostensibly ended on 4 August 1993 with the signing of the Arusha Accords to create a power-sharing government.

However, the assassination of Habyarimana in April 1994 proved to be the catalyst for the Rwandan Genocide, the commonly quoted death toll for which is 800,000. The closely interrelated causes of the war and genocide led some observers to assume that the reports of mass killings were in fact some new flaring of the war, rather than a different phase. The RPF restarted its offensive, eventually taking control of the country. The Hutu government-in-exile then proceeded to use refugee camps in neighboring countries to destabilize the new RPF government. The RPF and its proxy rebel forces prosecuted the First Congo War (1996-1997), which led in turn to the Second Congo War (1998-2003), all of which involved a Hutu force with the objective of regaining control of Rwanda. Thus while the civil war officially lasted until 1993, some literature has the war ending with the RPF capture of Kigali in 1994 or with the disbanding of the refugee camps in 1996, while some consider the presence of small rebel groups along the Rwandan border to mean that the civil war is ongoing.

Background

The ethnic tensions between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority had their roots in the Belgian colonial era, where the ruling Belgian authorities empowered the Tutsi aristocracy, and cemented the second class status of Hutus, in what had previously been a fairly fluid social system. Upon leaving Rwanda, Belgian diplomats stirred the pot by reversing their favoritism, encouraging nationalist Hutu uprisings in the name of democracy. Episodes of violent attacks and reprisals between Hutus and Tutsis flared up in the first two decades following Rwanda's independence, building tensions and resentment that would explode in the civil war and genocide of the 1990s.

A new wave of ethnic tensions were unleashed in 1990. One of the main causes was a slumping economy and food shortages. Throughout the year, the country was subject to bad weather and lessening coffee prices. These problems helped create a dangerous political climate. Further political tension was evident following a call by the for increased democracy in Francophone Africa. France, though not traditionally associated with Rwanda, began to show that it would put political pressure on Rwanda if it didn't make concessions to democracy. Many Rwandans heard the call, and began forming a democracy movement which protested during the summer.

Another source of mounting tensions in 1990, were the grumblings of the Tutsi diaspora. Those Tutsi who had been exiled over thirty years were now coming together in an organized group known as the RPF. The Hutu in Rwanda considered these Tutsi an evil aristocracy which had rightly been exiled. They pointed out that the descendants of these Tutsi no longer had any knowledge of Rwanda, and spoke English instead of French. The exiled Tutsi, however, demanded recognition of their rights as Rwandans which included the right to live there. These Tutsi began to pressure the Rwandan government, and eventually forced the Habyarimana government to make concessions. The RPF was under the command of Major-General Fred Rwigyema, who had risen to be deputy minister of defense in Uganda. However, growing xenophobia had led to his removal and new legislation prohibiting non-Ugandan nationals, including Rwandan refugees, from owning land. It was this "push" factor from Uganda, as much as the "pull" of their ancestral homes, that led the RPF to fight for citizenship in Rwanda.

Habyarimana found himself forced to set up a national committee to examine the "Concept of Democracy" and to work on the formation of a "National Political Charter" which would help reconcile the Hutus and Tutsis. During this crucial point in negotiations the situation went bad. The RPF was simply unwilling to wait any longer for the Rwandan government to come through on its promises.

Preparation for war

The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was formed in December 1987, as the successor organisation to the Rwandan Alliance of National Unity (RANU). The new organisation's goals included facilitating the return of all Rwandan refugees to Rwanda, using force if necessary, and to establish national unity and democracy in the country. The RPF, composed primarily of second-generation Tutsis, numbered over four thousand troops who were well-trained in the Ugandan army and had combat experience from the Ugandan Bush War. The RPF rebels were organized in a clandestine cell structure.

1990 invasion

At 2:30 pm on 1 October 1990, fifty RPF rebels deserted their posts and crossed the border from Uganda into Rwanda, killing a customs guard at the Kagitumba border post. They were followed by hundreds more rebels, dressed in the uniforms of the Ugandan national army and carrying Ugandan weaponry, including machine guns and rocket launchers. RPF demands included an end to ethnic segregation and the system of identity cards, as well as other political and economic reforms that portrayed the RPF as a democratic and tolerant organization seeking to depose a dangerous and corrupt regime. Both President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and President Habyarimana of Rwanda were in New York attending the United Nations World Summit for Children. The role of Uganda was immediately brought into question. It is likely that Museveni knew of the RPF and its planned invasion, but did not explicitly support it. Museveni had several motives for not interfering, including stability in western Uganda and the possibility of a strengthened position in future refugee negotiations with Habyarimana. Museveni denies any knowledge however, stating years later in a conference with fellow African heads of state, that the RPF had launched the invasion "without prior consultation". Museveni also said later that "faced with [a] fait accompli situation by our Rwandan brothers," Uganda went "to help the RPF, materially, so that they are not defeated because that would have been detrimental to the Tutsi people of Rwanda and would not have been good for Uganda's stability."

In the first few days of fighting, the RPF made significant progress, advancing 60 km (37 mi) south to the town of Gabiro. Their Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) opponents were numerically superior, with 5,200 soldiers, and possessed armoured cars and helicopters supplied by France, but the RPF benefitted from the element of surprise. The RPF suffered a significant reversal on the third day, however, when commander Fred Rwigyema was killed. It is likely that Rwigyema was killed by his subcommander Peter Bayingana, following an argument over tactics, although the current RPF-led Government of Rwanda contend that he was killed by a stray bullet.

The offensive failed after France and Zaire militarily intervened. Zaire sent several hundred troops of the elite Special Presidential Division (DSP) to fight alongside Rwandan government troops. In a military operation code-named Noroît, France deployed the 1st and 3rd companies of the 8th Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment, consisting of 125 soldiers, who were based in the Central African Republic, to support the Rwandan government. These forces were later joined by elements of the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment, 3rd Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment and 13th Parachute Dragoon Regiment. France, which had signed a defense pact with Habyarimana in 1975, insisted that its forces had been deployed strictly to protect its nationals, but the parachute companies set up positions blocking the RPF advance to the capital and Kigali International Airport. Col. René Galinié had command of the initial deployment, but was replaced by Col. Jean-Claude Thomann on 19 October. France also supplied the Rwandan government with shipments of artillery, mortars and other military equipment, along with financial aid. France claimed to be countering "aggression launched from an English-speaking country." At first, Belgium also supported the government but cut all military aid shortly after hostilities began, citing a domestic law prohibiting their military from taking part in a civil war. France, in contrast, supported the regime and gave significant military and financial support, thus replacing Belgium as Rwanda's major foreign sponsor.

On 7 October 1990, the government forces launched a counter-offensive. The RPF who had only prepared for a short war began to fall back when it became clear that they did not have the heavy equipment needed to face the government forces in a conventional conflict. Major Paul Kagame, who was in the United States taking a course at the Command and General Staff College, was contacted and returned to take control of the rebel forces. To make matters worse, on 23 October, two more RPF commanders, Major Peter Bayingana, who had taken de facto command, and Chris Bunyenyezi, were arrested by Salim Saleh, the Ugandan president's brother, for the murder of Rwigyema and brought back to Uganda for interrogation and eventual execution. The RPF force was thrown into confusion and by the end of the month, had been pushed back into Akagera National Park in the northeast corner of the country. French spotter planes were used to find retreating RPF units so they could be destroyed by the FAR.

On the night of 4 October, the Rwandan government staged a fake attack on Kigali with gunfire and explosions around the city. This piece of theater was intended to frighten the populace into supporting the war and encouraging the reporting of suspected RPF sympathizers among the Tutsi. Over 10,000 people were arrested. The reaction also included directed killing. A witness testified that, on 2 October, para-commandos under Major Aloys Ntabakuze separated civilians fleeing the fighting at Umutara into Hutu and Tutsi, and used grenades to kill the Tutsi. Eight days later, another witness testified that Ntabakuze ordered the ethnic cleansing of a village called Bahima. Ten days after the invasion, local officials in Kibilira were told to kill the local inyenzi and burn down their homes because of the threat of the RPF offensive. At least 348 civilians were killed in 48 hours.

The RPF regroup

On his arrival, Paul Kagame began to reorganize the RPF forces, which had been reduced to less than 2,000 troops, and decided to develop a guerrilla warfare in the north of the country. Museveni granted permission for the RPF to retreat back into Uganda for one night, during which Kagame and the troops completed a tiring overnight march west to the Virunga mountains, a high altitude area in which the Rwandan army could not attack them. The RPF spent two months in the mountains, without engaging the government forces. Conditions were harsh and some members of the army perished due to freezing temperatures.

The time in the Virungas was spent reorganising the army and rebuilding the leadership that had suffered so much during the fighting. Alexis Kanyarengwe, a Hutu and former ally of Habyarimana, was appointed RPF chairman; however, Tutsis continued to make up the majority of the leadership. During this time, the RPF also recruited from the Tutsi diaspora. In addition to Ugandans, new members arrived from Burundi, Tanzania, Zaire, the United States, and Europe. By early 1991, the RPF had grown to 5,000; by 1992 it had reached 12,000 and during the 1994 offensive it numbered 25,000.

In addition to recruiting personnel, the RPF carried out fund raising activity. The Tutsi diaspora worldwide contributed, as did some businessmen within Rwanda who were the victims of corruption by the Habyarimana regime. The RPF rearmed itself, both by purchasing arms on the international market and relying on clandestine supply from former colleagues in officer corps of the Ugandan army.

Guerrilla war

By January 1991, Kagame restarted the war. The first move, on 23 January 1991, was a surprise attack on the northern town of Ruhengeri. Ruhengeri was chosen due to its proximity to the Virunga mountains and its perception as being a stronghold of the Habyarimana regime. The RPF captured the town, benefiting from the element of surprise, and held it for one day before retreating back to the forests. During the occupation they captured weapons and equipment from the Rwandan army and stormed Ruhengeri prison, freeing political prisoners. The attack succeeded in creating a climate of fear in Rwanda.

Following this action the RPF withdrew and began to carry out a classic hit and run style guerrilla war. Low intensity fighting dragged on with neither side managing to inflict any major defeats on the other. The RPF started broadcasting from Uganda into Rwanda on its own radio station, called Radio Muhabura in 1991. It was monitored by the BBC starting in 1992, and was mostly a propaganda instrument for the RPF. It accused the Habyarimana government of genocide as early as January 1993, even before the Arusha accords. Over the next few years there were numerous attempts at ceasefires, though they achieved little and the fighting continued until 13 July 1992 when a cease-fire was signed in Arusha.

Arusha accords and after

Main article: Arusha accords

The war dragged on for almost 2.5 years until a cease-fire accord was signed on 12 July 1992, in Arusha, Tanzania, fixing a timetable for an end to the fighting and political talks, leading to a peace accord and power sharing, and authorizing a neutral military observer group under the auspices of the Organization for African Unity. The cease-fire took effect on 31 July 1992, and political talks began 31 September 1992.

Over the course of the following months negotiations continued, though without any serious breakthroughs and with the tension on both sides mounting. Finally, following reports of massacres of Tutsi, the RPF launched a major offensive on 8 February 1993.

This offensive forced the government forces back in disarray, allowing the RPF to quickly capture the town of Ruhengeri, and then to turn south and begin advancing on the capital. This caused panic in Paris (a long term supporter of the Habyarimana regime) which immediately sent several hundred French troops to the country along with large amounts of ammunition for the FAR artillery. The arrival of these French troops in Kigali seriously changed the military situation on the ground. Implicit in their support for the government and their rapid deployment was the threat that, should the RPF advance on the capital, then they may find themselves fighting French paratroopers as well as Rwandan government soldiers. On 20 February, with the RPF only 30 km (19 mi) north of Kigali, the rebels declared a unilateral ceasefire and over the following months pulled their forces back. By that time, over 1.5 million civilians, mostly Hutu, had left their homes. .

An uneasy peace was once again entered into, which would last until 7 April of the following year. Over the following months the peace process developed. One of the stipulations of the agreement was that the RPF would station a number of diplomats in Kigali at the CND parliament building. These men were to be protected by between 600-1000 RPF soldiers.

The Tutsi diaspora miscalculated the reaction of its invasion of Rwanda. Though the Tutsi objective seemed to be to pressure the Rwandan government into making concessions which would strip Tutsi of their largely 'second class' status, the invasion was seen as an attempt to bring the Tutsi ethnic group back into power. The effect was to increase ethnic tensions to a level higher than they had ever been. Hutu rallied around the President. Habyarimana himself reacted by instituting genocidal programs, which would be directed against all Tutsi and against any Hutu seen as in league with Tutsi interests. Habyarimana justified these acts by proclaiming it was the intent of the Tutsi to restore a kind of Tutsi feudal system and to thus enslave the Hutu race.

Military operations during the 1994 genocide

This section details the conduct of the war during the 1994 genocide. For details of the genocide itself, see Rwandan Genocide.

On 6 April 1994, President Habyarimana returned from negotiations in Dar es Salaam when his presidential jet was shot down, killing all inside. Interahamwe and the presidential guard began to kill opposition politicians and prominent Tutsi. Over the following days, it became clear that the target of these killings was the entire Tutsi population along with certain moderate Hutu. The Rwandan Genocide had begun and would last three months, killing hundreds of thousands of people, about 937,000 according to the RPF.

The nature of the genocide was not immediately apparent to foreign observers, and was initially explained as a violent phase of the civil war. Mark Doyle, the correspondent for the BBC News in Kigali, tried to explain the complex situation in late April 1994 thusly,

Look, you have to understand that there are two wars going on here. There's a shooting war and a genocide war. The two are connected, but also distinct. In the shooting war, there are two conventional armies at each other, and in the genocide war, one of those armies, the government side with help from civilians, is involved in mass killings.

By the evening of 7 April with killings becoming widespread and the RPF battalion in the parliament building coming under attack, the RPF renewed its offensive south. The RPF troops within the parliament building had fortified their defences during the previous months, in case they were caught in the capital with their supply lines cut and under attack. Now, these troops were engaged by the Rwandan army in the nearby army camp at Kanombe, near the airport. The rebel forces within the parliament complex, commanded by Lt Col Charlis Kayonnga, began to fight their way out and began to attack the surrounding government-held districts. Their primary focus, however, was to move north and link up with the main rebel army.

The main RPF forces in the north began a three pronged attack on the morning of 8 April. One group moved west to Ruhengeri and Char Mobile Force commanded by col Gashumba engaged government forces there, although they would make little progress and were more likely a defensive force securing the right flank of the RPF advance south. The second group under the command of Colonel Eugen Bagire (Commanding officer of the 7th Battalion) and Lieutenant-Colonel Fred Ibingira (Commanding officer of the 157 Battalion) moved down the eastern border of the country towards Kibungo. The third group under the command of Colonel Sam Kaka (commander of ALFA Mobile Force), Col. Charlis Ngoga (59th Battalion), Col. Musitu (21st Battalion), Charlis Muhire (101 Battalion) and Ludovic Twahirwa (known as Dodo, commander of the Bravo Mobile force) managed to make a major advance towards the capital by the evening of 11 April. Both sides began to reinforce and strengthen their positions, with the RPF beginning a slow but effective encirclement of the city. On 12 April, the provisional government fled to Gitarama in an attempt to escape the fighting.

In the east, the RPF faced little government resistance and reached the Tanzanian border on 22 April. However, with almost all of the RPF's heavy equipment focused on the battle for Kigali, the western advance on Ruhengeri stalemated.

In the capital, the RPF advance continued its slow yet methodical encirclement of the city, forcing the airport to close on 5 May due to intense shelling. A further sign of the success of Kagame's troops was the cutting of the Kigali-Gitarama road on 16 May. This was followed six days later by the capture of Kigali International Airport. In an attempt to reverse the defeats that it was suffering, the FAR launched a counter-attack on 6 June, although this was halted almost immediately and failed to achieve any significant gains.

The RPF forces, having control of the northern, eastern and southern suburbs, began to move north around the south-western edge of the city. This put further pressure on Gitarama which fell on 13 June. At this point, the RPF began to close in on the center of the capital, hoping to defeat the government forces in the field. This took the form of putting pressure on three sides of the city with infantry and light artillery and mortars, allowing the defenders no respite. Heavy fighting continued through June and into the first week on July. However, on 3 July the government forces began to withdraw from the capital, taking with them the majority of the civilian population. According to UN sources, they had almost completely run out of ammunition. The following day, after a three-month long battle, the RPF moved in and captured the entire capital.

In the meantime, the RPF's eastern forces had reached the south eastern edge of the country and then swung on an axis, hinged on Kigali, westward. Through June they pushed the government forces west through the southern region, along the border with Burundi. They finally stopped following their capture of Butare on 2 July and the arrival of the French, who blocked their path with the implementation of Opération Turquoise.

With the fall of Kigali, the government forces began to disintegrate. The army lost cohesion and began to rout, being closely pursued by the RPF. This made defending the last two northern towns of Ruhengeri and Gisenyi almost impossible. With his forces in the capital now freed up from the battle for Kigali, Kagame moved the bulk of his army north to capture the government's new power base. On 13 July, Ruhengeri finally capitulated, followed on 18 July by Gisenyi. In the south-west of the country, French forces from Operation Turquoise controlled a large area, which was given over to the RPF on 21 August 1994, thus giving the RPF complete control of the country.

The Tutsi rebels defeated the Hutu regime and ended the genocide in July 1994, but approximately two million Hutu refugees - some who participated in the genocide and feared Tutsi retaliation - fled to neighboring Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zaire. Thousands died in epidemics of cholera and dysentery that swept the refugee camps. The international community responded with one of the largest humanitarian relief efforts ever mounted. The Rassemblement Démocratique pour le Rwanda, composed of Hutu troops and militia members, began to militarize the camps, using them as bases to overthrow the new RPF-dominated government.

Its patience exhausted, Rwanda sponsored an invasion of Zaire in 1996. Its chosen proxy force was the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL) led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila. The AFDL and Rwandan forces, supported by Uganda, cleared the border refugee camps easily. However, many Hutu militants fled westwards, away from the border. The AFDL followed behind, marching towards Kinshasa as the regime of Mobutu Sese Seko collapsed. The AFDL overthrew the government and Kabila proclaimed himself the new president of the renamed Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in May 1997. Kabila soon turned on his Rwandan and Ugandan supporters, who reinvaded the DRC in 1998 to overthrow Kabila. Kabila formed an alliance with the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda, the successor organization to the Rassemblement Démocratique pour le Rwanda. After Kabila was assassinated in 2001 and his son Joseph became president, Hutu militants reformed into the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). The war ended officially in 2003. However, the remnants of the FDLR and possibly other Hutu militants maintain a presence in eastern Congo. While not strong enough to pose a threat to the Kagame government, they continue to destabilize the Rwanda-DRC border region.

References

Dallaire, Romeo. "Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda". Arrow Books (2003). ISBNJ 0-09-947893-5

Gourevitch, Philip (2000). . We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (3 ed.). London; New York: Picador. ISBN 0-330-37120-7 http://books.google.com/?id=8OiMfpTiApQC.

Government of Rwanda (2008). . "History". Official Website of the Government of Rwanda http://www.gov.rw/page.php?id_rubrique=9.

Government of Rwanda (2009). . "Chronology of Events Leading to Liberation". Official Website of the Government of Rwanda. Archived from the original on 2012-03-07http://web.archive.org/web/20120307130518/http://www.gov.rw/liberation15/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=37&Itemid=55.

Mamdani, Mahmood (2002). . When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-10280-5 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=QUEamxb89JcC.

Melvern, Linda (2000). . A People Betrayed. Zed Bookshttp://books.google.com/books?id=rhsRrxZtJwMC.

Prunier, Gérard (1995). . The Rwanda Crisis, 1959-1994: History of a Genocide (Hardcover ed.). London: C. Hurst & Co. Publishers. ISBN 1-85065-243-0 http://books.google.com/?id=XYIJcrgzgQ0C&pg=PA1&dq#v=onepage&q=&f=false.

Prunier, Gérard (2009). . Africa's World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-537420-9 http://books.google.com/books?id=kp93kUfdhC0C.

Steele, Jon. "War Junkie: One Man`s Addiction to the Worst Places on Earth" Corgi (2002). ISBN 0-552-14984-5

. Rwanda - The preventable genocide. The Report of International Panel of Eminent Personalities to Investigate the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda and Surrounding Events (IPEP). Addis Ababa: Organization of African Unity. 2000http://www.aegistrust.org/images/stories/oaureport.pdf.

External links

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The Rwandan Civil War was a conflict within the Central African nation of Rwanda, between the government of President Juvénal Habyarimana and the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The conflict began on 1 October 1990 when the RPF invaded and ostensibly ended on 4 August 1993 with the signing of the Arusha Accords to create a power-sharing government.

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I found this information that The international press has been inundated with the propaganda from the movement of the aggressors, who pretend to struggle for the advent of democracy and social justice in Rwanda.

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"The Rwandan civil war and genocide represent the manifestation and deeply rooted hate and division in classes

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A history of conflict: The Rwandan civil war and genocide from The Role of Tourism in Post-Conflict Peacebuilding in Rwanda on JSTOR

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JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

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Rwandan civil war took place between two ethnic groups. And it was estimated that 800,000 Rwandans were killed.

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RWANDA, Africa - Below are 10 facts about the Rwandan Genocide:
1. It took place between two ethnic groups populating Rwanda: the Hutus and the Tutsis
At the start of the 20 th century, most of the Rwandan population belonged to the Hutu ethnic group, who were traditionally crop-growers. Over many centuries, Rwanda attracted another group, traditional herdsmen, the Tutsis, from northern Africa. While the Tutsis were more frequently landowners, the Hutus were usually the laborers. This division of labor perpetuated a population in which the Hutus outnumbered the Tutsis.

It wasn't until European colonists arrived during the 1950s, that a divide developed between the two groups. The Europeans saw the Tutsis, who were taller with European 'aristocratic' appearances and, as was the practice of the time, selected this group to be both privileged and educated. Coupled with the introduction of modern weapons and war technique, this introduction of class into the Rwandan people marked the beginning of the end.
2. On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying President Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down. Immediately after that, violence ensued.
Under the cover of war, Hutu extremists launched their plans to destroy the entire Tutsi civilian population. Any Hutu moderate, suspected Tutsi, and Tutsi was systematically murdered. These killings took place in homes and even while Tutsis tried to flee. Extremists set up roadblocks across the country during the genocide, effectively putting a stopper to any escape attempts. Women were systematically and brutally raped.
3. Between April and June 1994 (~100 days), an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed.
Soldiers and police officers encouraged ordinary citizens to take part in the killings. Hutu civilians, forced by military personnel, were to murder their neighbors, friends, and even relatives. Participants were given incentives, in the form of money, food, or land, to kill Tutsis; they could appropriate the land of the Tutsis they killed.
4. An estimated 200,000 people participated in the perpetration of the genocide.
Sadly enough, the two ethnic groups are actually very similar - they speak the same language, inhabit the same areas, and follow many of the same traditions.
5. Corpses in the countryside were covered with banana leaves to screen them from aerial photography.
The genocide organizers were actually very conscious of the risks of international scrutiny, and over the radio would constantly incite killers to continue, but asked that "No more corpses [be put]on the road."
6. An unofficial militia group called the Interhamwe (meaning those who attack together) was formed after encouragement by the presidential guard.
At its peak, the group was 30,000-strong.
7. Unlike the genocides of Armenians in 1915, and Jews in 1941-5, the genocide in Rwanda was not kept secret.
Journalists would report what they saw, and even what was found after the genocide was over. A UN force (UNAMIR), which watched as people were killed in the streets, claimed: "We have no mandate to intervene."

Prior to the onset of the genocide, there had been at least ten clear warnings to the UN about the "Hutu power" action that was occurring. The UNAMIR commander had even sent a telegram to the then UN Secretary - General, Boutros Ghali, three months before the event.

The UN met in secret after violence broke out. Here, Great Britain urged the pull out of UNAMIR, and later tried blocking an American proposal to send a fact finding mission when the death toll had reached 6 figures.
8. The USA had initially banned officials from using the term 'genocide' immediately after the violence. 9. An International War Crimes Tribunal has been set up in Arusha, Tanzania, to try leaders of the genocide. However, no death sentences can be given.
The civil war and the genocide only ended when the Tutsi-dominated rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RBF), defeated the Hutu regime. Subsequently, President Paul Kegame took control.

After the RBF victory, an estimated two million Hutus fled to Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo)
10. Local Rwandan radios would use propaganda, an act against international law, to incite Hutus to violence.
Statements such as, "You have to kill the Tutsis, they're cockroaches. We must all fight the Tutsis. We must finish with them, exterminate them, sweep them from the whole country. There must be no refuge for them," were whispered into the ears of civilians across the country.

The killers, subsequently, were not fueled by drugs or violence but rather by a fanatic dedication to a political cause.

"The river Kagera flows into a steep ravine that forms the natural border between Tanzania and Rwanda ... it gathers into its currents huge clumps of elephant grass and numerous small trees. In the late spring of 1994 it was much the same with human corpses. They, too, twisted and turned, rose and dropped and came bouncing over the falls before they found the still water..." -Eyewitness Account
- Chloe Nevitt
Feature Writer

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10 Facts About The Rwandan Genocide - BORGEN

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RWANDA, Africa - Below are 10 facts about the Rwandan Genocide: 1. It took place between two ethnic groups populating Rwanda: the Hutus and the Tutsis At the start of the 20 th century, most of the Rwandan population belonged to the Hutu ethnic group, who were traditionally crop-growers.

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Former Rwandan president Habyarimana was killed when his private jet was shot down by the RPF as it was about to land. Supposedly, Paul Kagame who later became president was the one who ordered the attack. This took place April 6th, 1994.

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the aftermath -ellie

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the WAR was between to ethnic groups the HUTU and the TUTSI

sam.b

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On April 7, 1994, violence fuels the launch of what would become the worst episode of genocide since World War II: the massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

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On April 7, 1994, violence fuels the launch of what would become the worst episode of genocide since World War II: the massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Following the first wave of massacres, Rwandan forces manage to discourage international intervention with the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers. The Tutsis, a minority group that made up about 10 percent of Rwanda's population, received no assistance from the international community, although the United Nations later conceded that a mere 5,000 soldiers deployed at the outset would have stopped the wholesale slaughter.

The immediate roots of the 1994 genocide dated back to the early 1990s, when President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, began using anti-Tutsi rhetoric to consolidate his power among the Hutus. Beginning in October 1990, there were several massacres of hundreds of Tutsis. Although the two ethnic groups were very similar, sharing the same language and culture for centuries, the law required registration based on ethnicity. The government and army began to assemble the Interahamwe (meaning "those who attack together") and prepared for the elimination of the Tutsis by arming Hutus with guns and machetes. In January 1994, the United Nations forces in Rwanda warned that larger massacres were imminent.

On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down. It is not known if the attack was carried out by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi military organization stationed outside the country at the time, or by Hutu extremists trying to instigate a mass killing. In any event, Hutu extremists in the military, led by Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, immediately went into action, murdering Tutsis and moderate Hutus within hours of the crash.

The Belgian peacekeepers were killed the next day, a key factor in the withdrawal of U.N. forces from Rwanda. Soon afterward, the radio stations in Rwanda were broadcasting appeals to the Hutu majority to kill all Tutsis in the country. The army and the national police directed the slaughter, sometimes threatening Hutu civilians when persuasion didn't work. Thousands of innocent people were hacked to death with machetes by their neighbors. Despite the horrific crimes, the international community, including the United States, hesitated to take any action. They wrongly ascribed the genocide to chaos amid tribal war. President Bill Clinton later called America's failure to do anything to stop the genocide "the biggest regret" of his administration.

It was left to the RPF, led by Paul Kagame, to begin an ultimately successful military campaign for control of Rwanda. By the summer, the RPF had defeated the Hutu forces and driven them out of the country and into several neighboring nations. However, by that time, an estimated 75 percent of the Tutsis living in Rwanda had been murdered.
READ MORE: The Rwandan Genocide

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Violence erupts in Rwanda, foreshadowing genocide

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On April 7, 1994, violence fuels the launch of what would become the worst episode of genocide since World War II: the massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Following the first wave of massacres, Rwandan forces manage to discourage international intervention with the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers.

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On April 7, 1994, violence fuels the launch of what would become the worst episode of genocide since World War II: the massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Following the first wave of massacres, Rwandan forces manage to discourage international intervention with the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers. The Tutsis, a minority group that made up about 10 percent of Rwanda's population, received no assistance from the international community, although the United Nations later conceded that a mere 5,000 soldiers deployed at the outset would have stopped the wholesale slaughter.

The immediate roots of the 1994 genocide dated back to the early 1990s, when President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, began using anti-Tutsi rhetoric to consolidate his power among the Hutus. Beginning in October 1990, there were several massacres of hundreds of Tutsis. Although the two ethnic groups were very similar, sharing the same language and culture for centuries, the law required registration based on ethnicity. The government and army began to assemble the Interahamwe (meaning "those who attack together") and prepared for the elimination of the Tutsis by arming Hutus with guns and machetes. In January 1994, the United Nations forces in Rwanda warned that larger massacres were imminent.

On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down. It is not known if the attack was carried out by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi military organization stationed outside the country at the time, or by Hutu extremists trying to instigate a mass killing. In any event, Hutu extremists in the military, led by Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, immediately went into action, murdering Tutsis and moderate Hutus within hours of the crash.

The Belgian peacekeepers were killed the next day, a key factor in the withdrawal of U.N. forces from Rwanda. Soon afterward, the radio stations in Rwanda were broadcasting appeals to the Hutu majority to kill all Tutsis in the country. The army and the national police directed the slaughter, sometimes threatening Hutu civilians when persuasion didn't work. Thousands of innocent people were hacked to death with machetes by their neighbors. Despite the horrific crimes, the international community, including the United States, hesitated to take any action. They wrongly ascribed the genocide to chaos amid tribal war. President Bill Clinton later called America's failure to do anything to stop the genocide "the biggest regret" of his administration.

It was left to the RPF, led by Paul Kagame, to begin an ultimately successful military campaign for control of Rwanda. By the summer, the RPF had defeated the Hutu forces and driven them out of the country and into several neighboring nations. However, by that time, an estimated 75 percent of the Tutsis living in Rwanda had been murdered.
READ MORE: The Rwandan Genocide

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Violence erupts in Rwanda, foreshadowing genocide

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On April 7, 1994, violence fuels the launch of what would become the worst episode of genocide since World War II: the massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Following the first wave of massacres, Rwandan forces manage to discourage international intervention with the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers.

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A summary of the war, began in 1990 - 1994

Dean

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The genocide between the hutu and tutsi lasted only 3 months and was still more efficient than even the nazi's

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Rwanda's population consists of three ethnic groups: Hutus (88%), Tutsis (11%), and Twa pygmies (1%). The Republic of Rwanda has been torn apart by ethnic division and a civil war between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi. No other recent conflict in Africa has taken as high a toll in such a short period of time as the Rwanda genocide, in which between half a million and a million people were massacred. The genocide between April and July of 1994 began after Rwanda's Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana, with whom Paris had cultivated close ties, was killed when his plane was shot down. On April 6, 1994, the plane carrying Rwanda's president and his Burundian counterpart was shot down as it was landing in the capital, Kigali. Both men were killed, setting off a wave of revenge and ethnic cleansing. Extremist members of the president's Hutu people savagely attacked and murdered members of Rwanda's Tutsi minority, and many moderate Hutus too. U.N. peacekeepers withdrew after some of their troops were killed, and the rampage continued for 100 days.

Genocide was instant. Roadblocks sprang up right across the city of Kigali, the militia being armed with one intent - to identify and kill Tutsis. At the same time, Interahamwe began house-to-house searches.The names on the death lists were the first to be visited and slaughtered in their own homes. Children watched as their parents were tortured, beaten and killed in front of their eyes, before their own small bodies were sliced, smashed, abused, pulverised and discarded. The elderly, the pride of Rwandan society, were despised, and mercilessly murdered in cold blood. Neighbours turned on neighbours, friends on friends, even family on their own family members. Rwanda had turned into a nation of brutal, sadistic, merciless killers, and of innocent victims - overnight. The genocidaires did not kill a million people. They killed one, then another, then another...... day after day, hour after hour, minute by minute. Every minute of the day, someone, somewhere, was being murdered, screaming for mercy. And receiving none.

From April to July 1994, extremist political groups organized the massacre, directed primarily at the minority Tutsi ethnic group, but also against those from the Hutu majority who opposed the killings or had been active in the pro-democracy movement. Neighbors killed neighbors. Rwandans taking shelter in churches were slaughtered, as were pregnant women in maternity clinics. After the killing of 10 UN peacekeepers by Hutu radicals, the international community basically upped and left.

Radio stations in Rwanda had a special connotation inasmuch as it is sort of a radio culture. It is the means of communication, and in some villages it was even perceived as nearly the voice of God. The Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) actively encouraged people to search out and kill anyone who was from the Tutsi ethnic group. Radio broadcasts urged the Hutu to take up machetes and kill their neighbors. As that radio station became more and more virulent and became in fact absolutely criminal with the genocide, the UN local commander proposed to either jam it or to take it out. A number of nations through the U.N. were requested to provide assets for this purpose, but the response came in near unison that Rwanda is a sovereign state, and "as a sovereign state we have no right to interfere".

Samantha Power, author of A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide that was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, and named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, noted that : "In three short, cruel months, between April and July 1994, Rwanda experienced a genocide more efficient than that carried out by the Nazis in the Second World War. The killers were a varied bunch: drunk extremists chanting ''Hutu power, Hutu power;'' uniformed soldiers and militia men intent on wiping out the Tutsi inyenzi, or ''cockroaches;'' and ordinary villagers who had never themselves contemplated killing before, but who decided to join the frenzy. The murderers, and their ebullient abettors, were turned into ghastly marionettes, consumed by a manic wrath. Men and women, young and old, religious and agnostic, became killers. They killed with radios in one hand and machetes in the other. They killed in churches, at traffic lights, in supermarkets, and in homes. They killed after taunting, after savage beating, and, often, after raping.... By July 1994, when Tutsi rebels took control of the country, the killers had accomplished much of what they set out to achieve. Eight hundred thousand people—half of the Tutsis who had lived in Rwanda three months earlier—had been eliminated. The United States and its allies on the UN Security Council did not simply watch. They voted to withdraw the UN peacekeepers who were in Rwanda, abandoning Rwandans who had relied upon the blue helmets for their protection."

The slaughter ended when rebel forces of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) overthrew the genocidal government. However, ongoing political tensions, guerrilla warfare and massive refugee movements have continued to sow political instability and humanitarian crises throughout the Great Lakes region, including in neighboring Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire).

The Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front was victorious and formed a new government. Subsequently, many refugees (mostly Hutus) have fled Rwanda to neighboring Zaire (~2 million), Tanzania (~480,000), Burundi (~200,000) and Uganda (~10,000). In addition, another 1 million refugees were believed to be within Rwanda. These refugees have concentrated in huge numbers at barren places with no sanitation, polluted water and little food. These conditions have caused great suffering and mass death.

The largely Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which took power following the civil war and genocide of 1994, is the principal political force and controls the Government of National Unity. President Pasteur Bizimungu and Vice President and Minister of Defense General Paul Kagame both belong to the RPF. The mainly Hutu Republican Democratic Movement retained the office of Prime Minister. Prime Minister Pierre Rwigema ran the Government on a daily basis and is responsible for relations with the National Assembly.

The genocidal militias that massacred Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994 continued their campaign of ethnic extermination and sought to expand their operations beyond the northwest. The insurgents committed numerous serious human rights abuses, including killings of those perceived as Tutsi survivors of the genocide, and of Hutu officials who opposed their agenda, as well as of religious and humanitarian aid workers. The militias, composed of members of the defeated army, the former Rwandan Armed Forces (ex-FAR) and Interahamwe genocide gangs, regularly attack government offices and public service institutions, such as prisons, clinics, and schools. These actions have increased friction between the security forces and the Hutu population and created insecurity on the roads.

Insurgent militias, which include members of the ex-FAR and Interahamwe gangs and some former refugees, committed hundreds of killings both for political reasons and in pursuit of their genocidal ideology. They also sought to create panic and undermine confidence in the Government's ability to protect the population. In 1998 insurgents stepped up propaganda efforts, distributing hate literature and newspapers designed to persuade readers of the justness of their cause, their strength against the Government, and the evil intentions of the government's Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA). The tracts identified anyone who opposed the insurgents' cause as an enemy. Genocide survivors, Tutsi refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Hutu government officials, local Hutu politicians, and those who refused to cooperate with the insurgency all were targeted. By late summer 1998, the RPA appeared to have gained the upper hand against the insurgents. Intense operations by the RPA combined with disillusionment with the insurgency drove thousands of persons who had abandoned their homes to return to the relatively safer areas controlled by the RPA.

Romeo A. Dallaire, who commanded the U.N. peacekeeping force before, during and after the Rwandan genocide, later observed : "Rwanda essentially did not count, and one would question whether or not it does today. Rwanda simply had no strategic value with its geography, no strategic value in its resources as it just has coffee and tea, and those economies are already overstocked, and, as one interlocutor who came in the first day to do an assessment of whether or not they would send troops to support me said, the only thing they have here in Rwanda is a lot of people, and they have too much of it."

Under international law, a distinction is generally made between crimes against humanity and genocide. Genocide requires the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Crimes against humanity, in contrast, are acts intentionally causing great suffering or serious bodily or mental injury as part of a widespread or systematic attack knowingly directed against any civilian population. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was the first international tribunal to interpret the definition of genocide as provided in the Genocide Convention. The ICTR mandate expired at the end of 2015 after the ICTR had indicted 93 individuals for genocide and other serious violations of international humanitarian law. The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) was established in 2010 by UN Security Council Resolution 1966 to complete the remaining work of two specialized criminal tribunals, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Rwandan community-based gacaca courts responded to the 1994 genocide from 2005 to 2012, with over 10,000 of these courts established, trying approximately 1.2 million cases. The gacaca courts, as a form of transitional justice, received mixed reviews with regard to their ability to achieve truth, justice, and reconciliation among Rwandans. While the courts were considered a unique experiment in collaborative justice, human rights organizations stressed that they did not meet international standards for a fair trial, which require legal representation for the accused, the impartiality of judges, and witness protection.

France had long been accused of not doing enough to halt the massacres. France notably led Operation Turquoise, a military-humanitarian intervention launched under a UN mandate in June 1994. Its critics believe that it was in reality aimed at supporting the genocidal Hutu government. And there have also been repeated accusations that authorities in Paris helped suspects in the Rwanda genocide to escape while under French military protection.

France bears overwhelming responsibilities over the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and was "blind" to preparations for the massacres, a report by historians said 25 March 2021, while adding there was no evidence Paris was complicit in the killings. A historical commission set up by President Emmanuel Macron concluded there had been a "failure" on the part of France under former leader Francois Mitterrand over the genocide that saw around 800,000 people slaughtered, mainly from the ethnic Tutsi minority. Historian Vincent Duclert, who heads the commission, handed over the damning report to Macron at the Elysee Palace after years of accusations France did not do enough to halt the massacres and was even complicit in the crimes.

The report concluded that in July 1994, "murderers but also the masterminds of the genocide" were in a safe zone established by French forces in the west of the country "who the French political authorities refused to arrest". Socialist Mitterrand and his inner circle were also fearful of the encroachment of English-speaking influence into francophone Africa by Uganda and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) of Kagame. The report tells of French decision-makers trapped in "post-colonial" thinking who supported the "racist, corrupt and violent" regime of Habyarimana as he faced a Tutsi rebellion which many considered was directed from English-speaking Uganda.

France "bears significant responsibility" for enabling the genocide in Rwanda and still refuses to acknowledge its true role in the 1994 horror, said a separate report commissioned by Kigali that was released 24 May 2021. The damning report, commissioned in 2017 and running to nearly 600 pages, labels France a "collaborator" of the extremist Hutu regime that orchestrated the pogrom of some 800,000 people, and outright rejects the position that Paris was blind to their genocidal agenda.

The years-long investigation by US law firm Levy Firestone Muse said France knew a genocide was coming but remained "unwavering in its support" of its Rwandan allies, even when the planned extermination of the Tutsi minority was clear. "It is our conclusion that the French government bears significant responsibility for enabling a foreseeable genocide," states the Muse report, which drew on millions of pages of documents and interviews with more than 250 witnesses. It found no evidence, however, that French officials or personnel directly participated in the killing of Tutsis.

But the Muse report asserts greater French culpability, saying the Duclert Commission stopped short of explaining what France was responsible for, and erred in concluding that Paris "remained blind" to the looming genocide. "The French government was neither blind nor unconscious about the foreseeable genocide," the report stated.

The issue still poisons modern relations a quarter of a century later between France and Rwanda under its controversial President Paul Kagame, a former Tutsi rebel who has ruled the mountainous nation in Africa's Great Lakes region since the aftermath of the genocide.

Background

Rwanda is a very poor country with a market economy; over 90 percent of the population earns its living through subsistence agriculture. The principal export crops are coffee and tea. Per capita Gross National Product is estimated at $210 per year. The massive genocide and war in 1994 resulted in the destruction of much of the country's economic infrastructure, including utilities, roads, and hospitals. The main religions are Roman Catholic (65%), Protestant (9%), and Muslim (1%). The official languages are French and Kinyardwanda with Kiswahili spoken in commercial centers.

According to folklore, Tutsi cattle breeders began arriving in the area from the Horn of Africa in the 15th century and gradually subjugated the Hutu inhabitants. The Tutsis established a monarchy headed by a mwami (king) and a feudal hierarchy of Tutsi nobles and gentry. Through a contract known as ubuhake, the Hutu farmers pledged their services and those of their descendants to a Tutsi lord in return for the loan of cattle and use of pastures and arable land. Thus, the Tutsi reduced the Hutu to virtual serfdom. However, boundaries of race and class became less distinct over the years as some Tutsi declined until they enjoyed few advantages over the Hutu. The first European known to have visited Rwanda was German Count Von Goetzen in 1894. He was followed by missionaries, notably the "White Fathers." In 1899, the mwami submitted to a German protectorate without resistance. Belgian troops from Zaire chased the small number of Germans out of Rwanda in 1915 and took control of the country.

After World War I, the League of Nations mandated Rwanda and its southern neighbor, Burundi, to Belgium as the territory of Ruanda-Urundi. Following World War II, Ruanda-Urundi became a UN trust territory with Belgium as the administrative authority. Reforms instituted by the Belgians in the 1950s encouraged the growth of democratic political institutions but were resisted by the Tutsi traditionalists who saw in them a threat to Tutsi rule. An increasingly restive Hutu population, encouraged by the Belgian military, sparked a revolt in November 1959, resulting in the overthrow of the Tutsi monarchy. Two years later, the Party of the Hutu Emancipation Movement (PARMEHUTU) won an overwhelming victory in a UN-supervised referendum.

During the 1959 revolt and its aftermath, more than 160,000 Tutsis fled to neighboring countries. The PARMEHUTU government, formed as a result of the September 1961 election, was granted internal autonomy by Belgium on January 1, 1962. A June 1962 UN General Assembly resolution terminated the Belgian trusteeship and granted full independence to Rwanda (and Burundi) effective July 1, 1962.

Gregoire Kayibanda, leader of the PARMEHUTU Party, became Rwanda's first elected president, leading a government chosen from the membership of the directly elected unicameral National Assembly. Peaceful negotiation of international problems, social and economic elevation of the masses, and integrated development of Rwanda were the ideals of the Kayibanda regime. Relations with 43 countries, including the United States, were established in the first 10 years. Despite the progress made, inefficiency and corruption began festering in government ministries in the mid-1960s. On July 5, 1973, the military took power under the leadership of Maj. Gen. Juvenal Habyarimana, who dissolved the National Assembly and the PARMEHUTU Party and abolished all political activity.

In 1975, President Habyarimana formed the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (MRND) whose goals were to promote peace, unity, and national development. The movement was organized from the "hillside" to the national level and included elected and appointed officials.

Under MRND aegis, Rwandans went to the polls in December 1978, overwhelmingly endorsed a new constitution, and confirmed President Habyarimana as president. President Habyarimana was re-elected in 1983 and again in 1988, when he was the sole candidate. Responding to public pressure for political reform, President Habyarimana announced in July 1990 his intention to transform Rwanda's one-party state into a multi-party democracy.

On October 1, 1990, Rwandan exiles banded together as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and invaded Rwanda from their base in Uganda. The rebel force, composed primarily of ethnic Tutsis, blamed the government for failing to democratize and resolve the problems of some 500,000 Tutsi refugees living in diaspora around the world. The war dragged on for almost two years until a cease-fire accord was signed July 12, 1992, in Arusha, Tanzania, fixing a timetable for an end to the fighting and political talks, leading to a peace accord and power-sharing, and authorizing a neutral military observer group under the auspices of the Organization for African Unity. A cease-fire took effect July 31, 1992, and political talks began August 10, 1992.

On April 6, 1994, the airplane carrying President Habyarimana and the President of Burundi was shot down as it prepared to land at Kigali. Both presidents were killed. As though the shooting down was a signal, military and militia groups began rounding up and killing all Tutsis and political moderates, regardless of their ethnic background.

The prime minister and her 10 Belgian bodyguards were among the first victims. The killing swiftly spread from Kigali to all corners of the country; between April 6 and the beginning of July, a genocide of unprecedented swiftness left up to1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus dead at the hands of organized bands of militia-- Interahamwe. Even ordinary citizens were called on to kill their neighbors by local officials and government-sponsored radio. The president's MRND Party was implicated in organizing many aspects of the genocide.

The RPF battalion stationed in Kigali under the Arusha accords came under attack immediately after the shooting down of the president's plane. The battalion fought its way out of Kigali and joined up with RPF units in the north. The RPF then resumed its invasion, and civil war raged concurrently with the genocide for two months. French forces landed in Goma, Zaire, in June 1994 on a humanitarian mission. They deployed throughout southwest Rwanda in an area they called "Zone Turquoise," quelling the genocide and stopping the fighting there. The Rwandan army was quickly defeated by the RPF and fled across the border to Zaire followed by some 2 million refugees who fled to Zaire, Tanzania, and Burundi. The RPF took Kigali on July 4, 1994, and the war ended on July 16, 1994. The RPF took control of a country ravaged by war and genocide. Up to 800,000 had been murdered, another 2 million or so had fled, and another million or so were displaced internally.

The international community responded with one of the largest humanitarian relief efforts ever mounted. The U.S. was one of the largest contributors. The UN peacekeeping operation, UNAMIR, was drawn down during the fighting but brought back up to strength after the RPF victory. UNAMIR remained in Rwanda until March 8, 1996.

Following an uprising by the ethnic Tutsi Banyamulenge people in Eastern Zaire in October 1996, a huge movement of refugees began which brought over 600,000 back to Rwanda in the last two weeks of November. This massive repatriation was followed at the end of December 1996 by the return of another 500,000 from Tanzania, again in a huge, spontaneous wave. Less than 100,000 Rwandans were estimated to remain outside of Rwanda in late 1997, and they were thought to be the remnants of the defeated army of the the former genocidal government and its allies in the civilian militias known as Interahamwe.

With the return of the refugees, a new chapter in Rwandan history began. The government began the long-awaited genocide trials, which got off to an uncertain start in the closing days of 1996 and inched forward in 1997.

United Nations Security Council marked the closure on Dec. 31, 2015, of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), said a press statement of the council. The council acknowledged the substantial contribution of the ICTR to the process of national reconciliation and the restoration of peace and security, and to the fight against impunity and the development of international criminal justice, especially in relation to the crime of genocide, said the statement. It also noted that the establishment of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals by resolution 1966 (2010) was essential to ensure that the closure of the ICTR does not leave the door open to impunity for the remaining fugitives.

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No other recent conflict in Africa has taken as high a toll in such a short period of time as the Rwanda genocide, in which between half a million and a million people were massacred. From April to July 1994, extremist political groups organized the massacre, directed primarily at the minority Tutsi…

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Rwanda erupted into violence, neighbor turned on neighbor, family turned on family, and love turned to hate. The Rwandan genocide turned friends into enemies.
-Dakota

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The war arose from the long-running dispute between the Hutu and Tutsi groups within the Rwandan population. A 1959–1962 revolution had replaced the Tutsi monarchy with a Hutu-led republic, forcing more than 336,000 Tutsi to seek refuge in neighbouring countries.

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the war was between two ethnic groups the Hutu and the Tutsi

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A timeline explaining events that happened during the Rwandan Civil War

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between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed in the Rwandan genocide

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between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed in the Rwandan genocide

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Audicee

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On April 7, 1994, violence fuels the launch of what would become the worst episode of genocide since world war 2 the massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus

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On April 7, 1994, violence fuels the launch of what would become the worst episode of genocide since World War II: the massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Following the first wave of massacres, Rwandan forces manage to discourage international intervention with the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers. The Tutsis, a minority group that made up about 10 percent of Rwanda's population, received no assistance from the international community, although the United Nations later conceded that a mere 5,000 soldiers deployed at the outset would have stopped the wholesale slaughter.

The immediate roots of the 1994 genocide dated back to the early 1990s, when President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, began using anti-Tutsi rhetoric to consolidate his power among the Hutus. Beginning in October 1990, there were several massacres of hundreds of Tutsis. Although the two ethnic groups were very similar, sharing the same language and culture for centuries, the law required registration based on ethnicity. The government and army began to assemble the Interahamwe (meaning "those who attack together") and prepared for the elimination of the Tutsis by arming Hutus with guns and machetes. In January 1994, the United Nations forces in Rwanda warned that larger massacres were imminent.

On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down. It is not known if the attack was carried out by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi military organization stationed outside the country at the time, or by Hutu extremists trying to instigate a mass killing. In any event, Hutu extremists in the military, led by Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, immediately went into action, murdering Tutsis and moderate Hutus within hours of the crash.

The Belgian peacekeepers were killed the next day, a key factor in the withdrawal of U.N. forces from Rwanda. Soon afterward, the radio stations in Rwanda were broadcasting appeals to the Hutu majority to kill all Tutsis in the country. The army and the national police directed the slaughter, sometimes threatening Hutu civilians when persuasion didn't work. Thousands of innocent people were hacked to death with machetes by their neighbors. Despite the horrific crimes, the international community, including the United States, hesitated to take any action. They wrongly ascribed the genocide to chaos amid tribal war. President Bill Clinton later called America's failure to do anything to stop the genocide "the biggest regret" of his administration.

It was left to the RPF, led by Paul Kagame, to begin an ultimately successful military campaign for control of Rwanda. By the summer, the RPF had defeated the Hutu forces and driven them out of the country and into several neighboring nations. However, by that time, an estimated 75 percent of the Tutsis living in Rwanda had been murdered.
READ MORE: The Rwandan Genocide

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Violence erupts in Rwanda, foreshadowing genocide

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On April 7, 1994, violence fuels the launch of what would become the worst episode of genocide since World War II: the massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Following the first wave of massacres, Rwandan forces manage to discourage international intervention with the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers.

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the battle was between two ethnic groups the Hutu and the Tutsi

sam

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Rwanda genocide, in which between half a million and a million people were massacred.

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Rwanda's population consists of three ethnic groups: Hutus (88%), Tutsis (11%), and Twa pygmies (1%). The Republic of Rwanda has been torn apart by ethnic division and a civil war between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi. No other recent conflict in Africa has taken as high a toll in such a short period of time as the Rwanda genocide, in which between half a million and a million people were massacred. The genocide between April and July of 1994 began after Rwanda's Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana, with whom Paris had cultivated close ties, was killed when his plane was shot down. On April 6, 1994, the plane carrying Rwanda's president and his Burundian counterpart was shot down as it was landing in the capital, Kigali. Both men were killed, setting off a wave of revenge and ethnic cleansing. Extremist members of the president's Hutu people savagely attacked and murdered members of Rwanda's Tutsi minority, and many moderate Hutus too. U.N. peacekeepers withdrew after some of their troops were killed, and the rampage continued for 100 days.

Genocide was instant. Roadblocks sprang up right across the city of Kigali, the militia being armed with one intent - to identify and kill Tutsis. At the same time, Interahamwe began house-to-house searches.The names on the death lists were the first to be visited and slaughtered in their own homes. Children watched as their parents were tortured, beaten and killed in front of their eyes, before their own small bodies were sliced, smashed, abused, pulverised and discarded. The elderly, the pride of Rwandan society, were despised, and mercilessly murdered in cold blood. Neighbours turned on neighbours, friends on friends, even family on their own family members. Rwanda had turned into a nation of brutal, sadistic, merciless killers, and of innocent victims - overnight. The genocidaires did not kill a million people. They killed one, then another, then another...... day after day, hour after hour, minute by minute. Every minute of the day, someone, somewhere, was being murdered, screaming for mercy. And receiving none.

From April to July 1994, extremist political groups organized the massacre, directed primarily at the minority Tutsi ethnic group, but also against those from the Hutu majority who opposed the killings or had been active in the pro-democracy movement. Neighbors killed neighbors. Rwandans taking shelter in churches were slaughtered, as were pregnant women in maternity clinics. After the killing of 10 UN peacekeepers by Hutu radicals, the international community basically upped and left.

Radio stations in Rwanda had a special connotation inasmuch as it is sort of a radio culture. It is the means of communication, and in some villages it was even perceived as nearly the voice of God. The Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) actively encouraged people to search out and kill anyone who was from the Tutsi ethnic group. Radio broadcasts urged the Hutu to take up machetes and kill their neighbors. As that radio station became more and more virulent and became in fact absolutely criminal with the genocide, the UN local commander proposed to either jam it or to take it out. A number of nations through the U.N. were requested to provide assets for this purpose, but the response came in near unison that Rwanda is a sovereign state, and "as a sovereign state we have no right to interfere".

Samantha Power, author of A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide that was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, and named as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine, noted that : "In three short, cruel months, between April and July 1994, Rwanda experienced a genocide more efficient than that carried out by the Nazis in the Second World War. The killers were a varied bunch: drunk extremists chanting ''Hutu power, Hutu power;'' uniformed soldiers and militia men intent on wiping out the Tutsi inyenzi, or ''cockroaches;'' and ordinary villagers who had never themselves contemplated killing before, but who decided to join the frenzy. The murderers, and their ebullient abettors, were turned into ghastly marionettes, consumed by a manic wrath. Men and women, young and old, religious and agnostic, became killers. They killed with radios in one hand and machetes in the other. They killed in churches, at traffic lights, in supermarkets, and in homes. They killed after taunting, after savage beating, and, often, after raping.... By July 1994, when Tutsi rebels took control of the country, the killers had accomplished much of what they set out to achieve. Eight hundred thousand people—half of the Tutsis who had lived in Rwanda three months earlier—had been eliminated. The United States and its allies on the UN Security Council did not simply watch. They voted to withdraw the UN peacekeepers who were in Rwanda, abandoning Rwandans who had relied upon the blue helmets for their protection."

The slaughter ended when rebel forces of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) overthrew the genocidal government. However, ongoing political tensions, guerrilla warfare and massive refugee movements have continued to sow political instability and humanitarian crises throughout the Great Lakes region, including in neighboring Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire).

The Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front was victorious and formed a new government. Subsequently, many refugees (mostly Hutus) have fled Rwanda to neighboring Zaire (~2 million), Tanzania (~480,000), Burundi (~200,000) and Uganda (~10,000). In addition, another 1 million refugees were believed to be within Rwanda. These refugees have concentrated in huge numbers at barren places with no sanitation, polluted water and little food. These conditions have caused great suffering and mass death.

The largely Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which took power following the civil war and genocide of 1994, is the principal political force and controls the Government of National Unity. President Pasteur Bizimungu and Vice President and Minister of Defense General Paul Kagame both belong to the RPF. The mainly Hutu Republican Democratic Movement retained the office of Prime Minister. Prime Minister Pierre Rwigema ran the Government on a daily basis and is responsible for relations with the National Assembly.

The genocidal militias that massacred Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994 continued their campaign of ethnic extermination and sought to expand their operations beyond the northwest. The insurgents committed numerous serious human rights abuses, including killings of those perceived as Tutsi survivors of the genocide, and of Hutu officials who opposed their agenda, as well as of religious and humanitarian aid workers. The militias, composed of members of the defeated army, the former Rwandan Armed Forces (ex-FAR) and Interahamwe genocide gangs, regularly attack government offices and public service institutions, such as prisons, clinics, and schools. These actions have increased friction between the security forces and the Hutu population and created insecurity on the roads.

Insurgent militias, which include members of the ex-FAR and Interahamwe gangs and some former refugees, committed hundreds of killings both for political reasons and in pursuit of their genocidal ideology. They also sought to create panic and undermine confidence in the Government's ability to protect the population. In 1998 insurgents stepped up propaganda efforts, distributing hate literature and newspapers designed to persuade readers of the justness of their cause, their strength against the Government, and the evil intentions of the government's Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA). The tracts identified anyone who opposed the insurgents' cause as an enemy. Genocide survivors, Tutsi refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Hutu government officials, local Hutu politicians, and those who refused to cooperate with the insurgency all were targeted. By late summer 1998, the RPA appeared to have gained the upper hand against the insurgents. Intense operations by the RPA combined with disillusionment with the insurgency drove thousands of persons who had abandoned their homes to return to the relatively safer areas controlled by the RPA.

Romeo A. Dallaire, who commanded the U.N. peacekeeping force before, during and after the Rwandan genocide, later observed : "Rwanda essentially did not count, and one would question whether or not it does today. Rwanda simply had no strategic value with its geography, no strategic value in its resources as it just has coffee and tea, and those economies are already overstocked, and, as one interlocutor who came in the first day to do an assessment of whether or not they would send troops to support me said, the only thing they have here in Rwanda is a lot of people, and they have too much of it."

Under international law, a distinction is generally made between crimes against humanity and genocide. Genocide requires the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Crimes against humanity, in contrast, are acts intentionally causing great suffering or serious bodily or mental injury as part of a widespread or systematic attack knowingly directed against any civilian population. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was the first international tribunal to interpret the definition of genocide as provided in the Genocide Convention. The ICTR mandate expired at the end of 2015 after the ICTR had indicted 93 individuals for genocide and other serious violations of international humanitarian law. The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) was established in 2010 by UN Security Council Resolution 1966 to complete the remaining work of two specialized criminal tribunals, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Rwandan community-based gacaca courts responded to the 1994 genocide from 2005 to 2012, with over 10,000 of these courts established, trying approximately 1.2 million cases. The gacaca courts, as a form of transitional justice, received mixed reviews with regard to their ability to achieve truth, justice, and reconciliation among Rwandans. While the courts were considered a unique experiment in collaborative justice, human rights organizations stressed that they did not meet international standards for a fair trial, which require legal representation for the accused, the impartiality of judges, and witness protection.

France had long been accused of not doing enough to halt the massacres. France notably led Operation Turquoise, a military-humanitarian intervention launched under a UN mandate in June 1994. Its critics believe that it was in reality aimed at supporting the genocidal Hutu government. And there have also been repeated accusations that authorities in Paris helped suspects in the Rwanda genocide to escape while under French military protection.

France bears overwhelming responsibilities over the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and was "blind" to preparations for the massacres, a report by historians said 25 March 2021, while adding there was no evidence Paris was complicit in the killings. A historical commission set up by President Emmanuel Macron concluded there had been a "failure" on the part of France under former leader Francois Mitterrand over the genocide that saw around 800,000 people slaughtered, mainly from the ethnic Tutsi minority. Historian Vincent Duclert, who heads the commission, handed over the damning report to Macron at the Elysee Palace after years of accusations France did not do enough to halt the massacres and was even complicit in the crimes.

The report concluded that in July 1994, "murderers but also the masterminds of the genocide" were in a safe zone established by French forces in the west of the country "who the French political authorities refused to arrest". Socialist Mitterrand and his inner circle were also fearful of the encroachment of English-speaking influence into francophone Africa by Uganda and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) of Kagame. The report tells of French decision-makers trapped in "post-colonial" thinking who supported the "racist, corrupt and violent" regime of Habyarimana as he faced a Tutsi rebellion which many considered was directed from English-speaking Uganda.

France "bears significant responsibility" for enabling the genocide in Rwanda and still refuses to acknowledge its true role in the 1994 horror, said a separate report commissioned by Kigali that was released 24 May 2021. The damning report, commissioned in 2017 and running to nearly 600 pages, labels France a "collaborator" of the extremist Hutu regime that orchestrated the pogrom of some 800,000 people, and outright rejects the position that Paris was blind to their genocidal agenda.

The years-long investigation by US law firm Levy Firestone Muse said France knew a genocide was coming but remained "unwavering in its support" of its Rwandan allies, even when the planned extermination of the Tutsi minority was clear. "It is our conclusion that the French government bears significant responsibility for enabling a foreseeable genocide," states the Muse report, which drew on millions of pages of documents and interviews with more than 250 witnesses. It found no evidence, however, that French officials or personnel directly participated in the killing of Tutsis.

But the Muse report asserts greater French culpability, saying the Duclert Commission stopped short of explaining what France was responsible for, and erred in concluding that Paris "remained blind" to the looming genocide. "The French government was neither blind nor unconscious about the foreseeable genocide," the report stated.

The issue still poisons modern relations a quarter of a century later between France and Rwanda under its controversial President Paul Kagame, a former Tutsi rebel who has ruled the mountainous nation in Africa's Great Lakes region since the aftermath of the genocide.

Background

Rwanda is a very poor country with a market economy; over 90 percent of the population earns its living through subsistence agriculture. The principal export crops are coffee and tea. Per capita Gross National Product is estimated at $210 per year. The massive genocide and war in 1994 resulted in the destruction of much of the country's economic infrastructure, including utilities, roads, and hospitals. The main religions are Roman Catholic (65%), Protestant (9%), and Muslim (1%). The official languages are French and Kinyardwanda with Kiswahili spoken in commercial centers.

According to folklore, Tutsi cattle breeders began arriving in the area from the Horn of Africa in the 15th century and gradually subjugated the Hutu inhabitants. The Tutsis established a monarchy headed by a mwami (king) and a feudal hierarchy of Tutsi nobles and gentry. Through a contract known as ubuhake, the Hutu farmers pledged their services and those of their descendants to a Tutsi lord in return for the loan of cattle and use of pastures and arable land. Thus, the Tutsi reduced the Hutu to virtual serfdom. However, boundaries of race and class became less distinct over the years as some Tutsi declined until they enjoyed few advantages over the Hutu. The first European known to have visited Rwanda was German Count Von Goetzen in 1894. He was followed by missionaries, notably the "White Fathers." In 1899, the mwami submitted to a German protectorate without resistance. Belgian troops from Zaire chased the small number of Germans out of Rwanda in 1915 and took control of the country.

After World War I, the League of Nations mandated Rwanda and its southern neighbor, Burundi, to Belgium as the territory of Ruanda-Urundi. Following World War II, Ruanda-Urundi became a UN trust territory with Belgium as the administrative authority. Reforms instituted by the Belgians in the 1950s encouraged the growth of democratic political institutions but were resisted by the Tutsi traditionalists who saw in them a threat to Tutsi rule. An increasingly restive Hutu population, encouraged by the Belgian military, sparked a revolt in November 1959, resulting in the overthrow of the Tutsi monarchy. Two years later, the Party of the Hutu Emancipation Movement (PARMEHUTU) won an overwhelming victory in a UN-supervised referendum.

During the 1959 revolt and its aftermath, more than 160,000 Tutsis fled to neighboring countries. The PARMEHUTU government, formed as a result of the September 1961 election, was granted internal autonomy by Belgium on January 1, 1962. A June 1962 UN General Assembly resolution terminated the Belgian trusteeship and granted full independence to Rwanda (and Burundi) effective July 1, 1962.

Gregoire Kayibanda, leader of the PARMEHUTU Party, became Rwanda's first elected president, leading a government chosen from the membership of the directly elected unicameral National Assembly. Peaceful negotiation of international problems, social and economic elevation of the masses, and integrated development of Rwanda were the ideals of the Kayibanda regime. Relations with 43 countries, including the United States, were established in the first 10 years. Despite the progress made, inefficiency and corruption began festering in government ministries in the mid-1960s. On July 5, 1973, the military took power under the leadership of Maj. Gen. Juvenal Habyarimana, who dissolved the National Assembly and the PARMEHUTU Party and abolished all political activity.

In 1975, President Habyarimana formed the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (MRND) whose goals were to promote peace, unity, and national development. The movement was organized from the "hillside" to the national level and included elected and appointed officials.

Under MRND aegis, Rwandans went to the polls in December 1978, overwhelmingly endorsed a new constitution, and confirmed President Habyarimana as president. President Habyarimana was re-elected in 1983 and again in 1988, when he was the sole candidate. Responding to public pressure for political reform, President Habyarimana announced in July 1990 his intention to transform Rwanda's one-party state into a multi-party democracy.

On October 1, 1990, Rwandan exiles banded together as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and invaded Rwanda from their base in Uganda. The rebel force, composed primarily of ethnic Tutsis, blamed the government for failing to democratize and resolve the problems of some 500,000 Tutsi refugees living in diaspora around the world. The war dragged on for almost two years until a cease-fire accord was signed July 12, 1992, in Arusha, Tanzania, fixing a timetable for an end to the fighting and political talks, leading to a peace accord and power-sharing, and authorizing a neutral military observer group under the auspices of the Organization for African Unity. A cease-fire took effect July 31, 1992, and political talks began August 10, 1992.

On April 6, 1994, the airplane carrying President Habyarimana and the President of Burundi was shot down as it prepared to land at Kigali. Both presidents were killed. As though the shooting down was a signal, military and militia groups began rounding up and killing all Tutsis and political moderates, regardless of their ethnic background.

The prime minister and her 10 Belgian bodyguards were among the first victims. The killing swiftly spread from Kigali to all corners of the country; between April 6 and the beginning of July, a genocide of unprecedented swiftness left up to1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus dead at the hands of organized bands of militia-- Interahamwe. Even ordinary citizens were called on to kill their neighbors by local officials and government-sponsored radio. The president's MRND Party was implicated in organizing many aspects of the genocide.

The RPF battalion stationed in Kigali under the Arusha accords came under attack immediately after the shooting down of the president's plane. The battalion fought its way out of Kigali and joined up with RPF units in the north. The RPF then resumed its invasion, and civil war raged concurrently with the genocide for two months. French forces landed in Goma, Zaire, in June 1994 on a humanitarian mission. They deployed throughout southwest Rwanda in an area they called "Zone Turquoise," quelling the genocide and stopping the fighting there. The Rwandan army was quickly defeated by the RPF and fled across the border to Zaire followed by some 2 million refugees who fled to Zaire, Tanzania, and Burundi. The RPF took Kigali on July 4, 1994, and the war ended on July 16, 1994. The RPF took control of a country ravaged by war and genocide. Up to 800,000 had been murdered, another 2 million or so had fled, and another million or so were displaced internally.

The international community responded with one of the largest humanitarian relief efforts ever mounted. The U.S. was one of the largest contributors. The UN peacekeeping operation, UNAMIR, was drawn down during the fighting but brought back up to strength after the RPF victory. UNAMIR remained in Rwanda until March 8, 1996.

Following an uprising by the ethnic Tutsi Banyamulenge people in Eastern Zaire in October 1996, a huge movement of refugees began which brought over 600,000 back to Rwanda in the last two weeks of November. This massive repatriation was followed at the end of December 1996 by the return of another 500,000 from Tanzania, again in a huge, spontaneous wave. Less than 100,000 Rwandans were estimated to remain outside of Rwanda in late 1997, and they were thought to be the remnants of the defeated army of the the former genocidal government and its allies in the civilian militias known as Interahamwe.

With the return of the refugees, a new chapter in Rwandan history began. The government began the long-awaited genocide trials, which got off to an uncertain start in the closing days of 1996 and inched forward in 1997.

United Nations Security Council marked the closure on Dec. 31, 2015, of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), said a press statement of the council. The council acknowledged the substantial contribution of the ICTR to the process of national reconciliation and the restoration of peace and security, and to the fight against impunity and the development of international criminal justice, especially in relation to the crime of genocide, said the statement. It also noted that the establishment of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals by resolution 1966 (2010) was essential to ensure that the closure of the ICTR does not leave the door open to impunity for the remaining fugitives.

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No other recent conflict in Africa has taken as high a toll in such a short period of time as the Rwanda genocide, in which between half a million and a million people were massacred. From April to July 1994, extremist political groups organized the massacre, directed primarily at the minority Tutsi…

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Dakota

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In just 100 days in 1994, about 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda by ethnic Hutu extremists. They were targeting members of the minority Tutsi community, as well as their political opponents, irrespective of their ethnic origin.

Warning: Contains graphic images.

How did the genocide start?

About 85% of Rwandans are Hutus but the Tutsi minority has long dominated the country. In 1959, the Hutus overthrew the Tutsi monarchy and tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to neighbouring countries, including Uganda.

A group of Tutsi exiles formed a rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which invaded Rwanda in 1990 and fighting continued until a 1993 peace deal was agreed.

On the night of 6 April 1994 a plane carrying then-President Juvenal Habyarimana, and his counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi - both Hutus - was shot down, killing everyone on board.

Hutu extremists blamed the RPF and immediately started a well-organised campaign of slaughter. The RPF said the plane had been shot down by Hutus to provide an excuse for the genocide.

With meticulous organisation. Lists of government opponents were handed out to militias who went and killed them, along with all of their families.

Neighbours killed neighbours and some husbands even killed their Tutsi wives, saying they would be killed if they refused.

At the time, ID cards had people's ethnic group on them, so militias set up roadblocks where Tutsis were slaughtered, often with machetes which most Rwandans kept around the house.

Thousands of Tutsi women were taken away and kept as sex slaves.

Why was it so vicious?

Rwanda has always been a tightly controlled society, organised like a pyramid from each district up to the top of government. The then-governing party, MRND, had a youth wing called the Interahamwe, which was turned into a militia to carry out the slaughter.

Weapons and hit-lists were handed out to local groups, who knew exactly where to find their targets.

The Hutu extremists set up a radio station, RTLM, and newspapers which circulated hate propaganda, urging people to "weed out the cockroaches" meaning kill the Tutsis. The names of prominent people to be killed were read out on radio.

Even priests and nuns have been convicted of killing people, including some who sought shelter in churches.

By the end of the 100-day killing spree, around 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus had been killed.

The UN and Belgium had forces in Rwanda but the UN mission was not given a mandate to stop the killing.

A year after US troops were killed in Somalia, the US was determined not to get involved in another African conflict. The Belgians and most UN peacekeepers pulled out after 10 Belgian soldiers were killed.

The French, who were allies of the Hutu government, sent a special force to evacuate their citizens and later set up a supposedly safe zone but were accused of not doing enough to stop the slaughter in that area.

Paul Kagame, Rwanda's current president, has accused France of backing those who carried out the massacres - a charge denied by Paris.

How did it end?

The well-organised RPF, backed by Uganda's army, gradually seized more territory, until 4 July 1994, when its forces marched into the capital, Kigali.

Some two million Hutus - both civilians and some of those involved in the genocide - then fled across the border into the Democratic Republic of Congo, at the time called Zaire, fearing revenge attacks. Others went to neighbouring Tanzania and Burundi.

Human rights groups say RPF fighters killed thousands of Hutu civilians as they took power - and more after they went into DR Congo to pursue the Interahamwe. The RPF denies this.

In DR Congo, thousands died from cholera, while aid groups were accused of letting much of their assistance fall into the hands of the Hutu militias.

What happened in DR Congo?

The RPF, now in power in Rwanda, embraced militias fighting both the Hutu militias and the Congolese army, which was aligned with the Hutus.

The Rwanda-backed rebel groups eventually marched on DR Congo's capital, Kinshasa, and overthrew the government of Mobutu Sese Seko, installing Laurent Kabila as president.

But the new president's reluctance to tackle Hutu militias led to a new war that dragged in six countries and led to the creation of numerous armed groups fighting for control of this mineral-rich country.

An estimated five million people died as a result of the conflict which lasted until 2003, with some armed groups active until now in the areas near Rwanda's border.

Has anyone faced justice?

Instead, the UN Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the Tanzanian town of Arusha to prosecute the ringleaders.

A total of 93 people were indicted and after lengthy and expensive trials, dozens of senior officials in the former regime were convicted of genocide - all of them Hutus.

Within Rwanda, community courts, known as gacaca, were created to speed up the prosecution of hundreds of thousands of genocide suspects awaiting trial.

Correspondents say up to 10,000 people died in prison before they could be brought to justice.

For a decade until 2012, 12,000 gacaca courts met once a week in villages across the country, often outdoors in a marketplace or under a tree, trying more than 1.2 million cases.

Their aim was to achieve truth, justice and reconciliation among Rwandans as "gacaca" means to sit down and discuss an issue.

What is Rwanda like now?

President Kagame has been hailed for transforming the tiny, devastated country he took over through policies which encouraged rapid economic growth. He has also tried to turn Rwanda into a technological hub and is very active on Twitter.

But his critics say he does not tolerate dissent and several opponents have met unexplained deaths, both in the country and abroad.

The genocide is obviously still a hugely sensitive issue in Rwanda, and it is illegal to talk about ethnicity.

The government says this is to prevent hate speech and more bloodshed but some say it prevents true reconciliation.

Charges of stirring up ethnic hatred have been levelled against some of Mr Kagame's critics, which they say is a way of sidelining them.

He won a third term in office in the most recent election in 2017 with 98.63% of the vote.

All photographs belong to the copyright holders as marked

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In just 100 days in 1994, some 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda by ethnic Hutu extremists - how did the genocide happen?

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many died, and the US government admitted that 5000 soldiers could have stopped the genocide

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On April 7, 1994, violence fuels the launch of what would become the worst episode of genocide since World War II: the massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Following the first wave of massacres, Rwandan forces manage to discourage international intervention with the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers. The Tutsis, a minority group that made up about 10 percent of Rwanda's population, received no assistance from the international community, although the United Nations later conceded that a mere 5,000 soldiers deployed at the outset would have stopped the wholesale slaughter.

The immediate roots of the 1994 genocide dated back to the early 1990s, when President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, began using anti-Tutsi rhetoric to consolidate his power among the Hutus. Beginning in October 1990, there were several massacres of hundreds of Tutsis. Although the two ethnic groups were very similar, sharing the same language and culture for centuries, the law required registration based on ethnicity. The government and army began to assemble the Interahamwe (meaning "those who attack together") and prepared for the elimination of the Tutsis by arming Hutus with guns and machetes. In January 1994, the United Nations forces in Rwanda warned that larger massacres were imminent.

On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down. It is not known if the attack was carried out by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi military organization stationed outside the country at the time, or by Hutu extremists trying to instigate a mass killing. In any event, Hutu extremists in the military, led by Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, immediately went into action, murdering Tutsis and moderate Hutus within hours of the crash.

The Belgian peacekeepers were killed the next day, a key factor in the withdrawal of U.N. forces from Rwanda. Soon afterward, the radio stations in Rwanda were broadcasting appeals to the Hutu majority to kill all Tutsis in the country. The army and the national police directed the slaughter, sometimes threatening Hutu civilians when persuasion didn't work. Thousands of innocent people were hacked to death with machetes by their neighbors. Despite the horrific crimes, the international community, including the United States, hesitated to take any action. They wrongly ascribed the genocide to chaos amid tribal war. President Bill Clinton later called America's failure to do anything to stop the genocide "the biggest regret" of his administration.

It was left to the RPF, led by Paul Kagame, to begin an ultimately successful military campaign for control of Rwanda. By the summer, the RPF had defeated the Hutu forces and driven them out of the country and into several neighboring nations. However, by that time, an estimated 75 percent of the Tutsis living in Rwanda had been murdered.
READ MORE: The Rwandan Genocide

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Violence erupts in Rwanda, foreshadowing genocide

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On April 7, 1994, violence fuels the launch of what would become the worst episode of genocide since World War II: the massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Following the first wave of massacres, Rwandan forces manage to discourage international intervention with the murder of 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers.