The Genocide
Within days of the plane crash, dump trucks had to prowl the streets to pick up all the bodies. So many corpses were dumped in the rivers that they flowed down rivers and washed onto the shores of Lake Victoria in neighboring Uganda.
The RPF quickly mounted an offensive, but it would take its forces three months to conquer the entire country. Some 2 million Hutu refugees poured into Congo and other neighboring countries, sparking another humanitarian disaster.
When the RPF reached Kigali, the country was shattered. A display in the city's Genocide Museum reads: "Many families had been totally wiped out with no one to remember or document their deaths. The streets were littered with corpses. Dogs were eating the rotting flesh of their owners. The country smelt of the stench of death. The 'genocidaires' had been more successful in their evil aims than anyone would have dared to believe. Rwanda was dead."
For additional reading, the most powerful book is Philip Gourevitch's We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda. In an updated 2006 version, Linda Melvern incorporates evidence gathered by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in her comprehensive history Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide.
Romeo Dallaire, who was the Canadian general in charge of the U.N. monitoring force, delivered a powerful first-person account and excoriation of the international community's inaction in Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.
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