The Genocide
The killing was systematic. It was relentless. It was brutal. The weapon of choice was the machete and, the killers were people's neighbors and colleagues and friends. As many as 1 million Rwandans were killed in just three months during the spring of 1994.
In the years and months leading up to the genocide, extremist elements in the Hutu government planned for a bloody campaign against the Tutsi minority. They imported and distributed thousands of machetes. Vitriolic anti-Tutsi propaganda spewed daily from an extremist radio station, where Tutsis were referred to as inyenzi, or cockroaches. Later, the station broadcast names and addresses of people to be killed–lists that were drawn up in planning meetings months earlier. Militias manned roadblocks throughout the capital and across the country to find Tutsis trying to escape.
The exact origins of the ethnic differences are murky, but the antipathy between Hutus and Tutsis does have some roots in Rwanda's colonial past. Belgium, which ruled Rwanda for 40 years, bestowed preferential treatment on the Tutsi minority. The Belgians conducted a census and, using often arbitrary physical characteristics to identify each Rwandan's ethnicity, issued identity cards recording every person's ethnic group. Amid growing demands for independence in the late 1950s, the Hutu majority grew increasingly restless, and Belgium switched its support to Hutu leaders. In 1959, Hutu gangs protesting the beating of a politician went on a rampage, looting homes and killing Tutsis. Hundreds were killed, and thousands more fled into exile.
After independence in 1962, a Hutu-led government took power. Ethnic tension continued to simmer for years as Tutsis often were excluded from schools and government jobs. Growing numbers of Tutsis in exile founded the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a military movement to overthrow the Hutu regime. As the 1990s began, ethnic killings were common in Rwanda. The Rwandan government trained civilian militias known as the Interahamwe (who would later man the roadblocks where Tutsis were singled out and killed). The RPF conducted raids into Rwanda under the leadership of Paul Kagame (who is the current president of Rwanda). Under pressure, both sides agreed to a shaky peace deal, and a small United Nations monitoring mission was sent in 1993.
On the night of April 6, 1994, unknown assailants used rocket-propelled grenades to shoot down an airplane carrying Rwanda's president, Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu who fomented hatred of the Tutsis, as it tried to land at Kigali's airport. The Hutu-controlled media blamed Kagame's Tutsi supports, though suspicions have since shifted to the possibility that the assassination was undertaken by more extremist Hutus opposed to a pending national power-sharing accord. In any event, the killing began within hours, across the country. Moderate politicians were the first to be targeted, along with 10 Belgian soldiers serving as U.N. peacekeepers. (Within a few days, the Belgians pulled their troops out, and the small U.N. team could only watch as the massacres spread. In the United States, the Clinton administration, still smarting from the death of 17 U.S. soldiers during a U.N. peacekeeping mission in Somalia, was reluctant to intervene and blocked efforts to reinforce the U.N. soldiers.)
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.