Rwanda Genocide

Sarah Lanasier, Wahida Nur Kamila, Rhayzan Ahsan, Zahra Kartika X MIPA 6

English

Ms. Keisha, Ms. Wiwin

11 March 2020

Wars, Genocides, and Crimes against Humanity

The Rwandan Genocide was a mass-killing of the Tutsi and moderate Hutu ethnic groups that took place in Rwanda, during the Rwandan Civil War. The killings happened over the course of 100 days exactly, taking place from April 7 to July 15, 1994. Over a million people were killed in this genocide, and it all started with ethnic tensions going around between the two ethnicities in Rwanda, the Tutsi and Hutus.

Rwanda has been off to a rough start since before their independence in the early 1960s. For years they were under colonization of Belgium, which placed them under a trusteeship under a League of Nations mandate after the First World War. The Tutsi and Hutu groups were very similar to one another genetically, culturally, linguistically, and in many other ways. During the time of Belgium’s colonization, they favored the Tutsi minority over the Hutus, based on their monarchic, economic, and educational backgrounds. This preference of ethnicity caused tension between the two ethnic groups which later caused violence and even led to a genocide to take place and when Rwanda gained independence, the Hutu majority turned against the Tutsis.

In 1961, a Hutu revolution took place in which up to 330,000 Tutsis would be exiled from Rwanda, making them an even smaller minority than they already were. After a UN mandate that same year, Belgium granted independence to Rwanda in July 1962. In 1973, a military group declared Major General Habyarimana (a Hutu) in power and would become the leader of Rwanda for the next two decades. Between 1990 and 1993, government officials released massacres, which killed hundreds of Tutsis.

April of 1994 was when the genocide was officially stated to begin. On the 6^th, a plane carrying Habyarimana and Burundi’s president Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down over the capital city of Kigali, which left all the passengers dead. The day after, the mass killings started. The Hutu Prime Minster along with 10 Belgian Peacekeepers were killed, being some of the first victims of the genocide. This killing triggered the withdrawal of Belgian troops. And given the situation, the UN notified the peacekeepers to protect themselves since trying to fix anything would be too dangerous.

The mass killings in Kigali immediately spread from that city to the remainder of Rwanda. In the initial fourteen days, neighborhood managers in central and southern Rwanda, where most Tutsi lived, opposed the decimation. After April 18, national authorities expelled the resisters and murdered a few of them. Different rivals at that point fell quiet or effectively drove the executing. Government-supported radio broadcasts began approaching standard Rwandan regular people to kill their neighbors. Inside a quarter of a year, approximately 800,000 individuals had been killed.

The genocide ended in a courtroom, where the trials of the Rwandan Genocide took place. In October 1994, they addressed the matter by establishing the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. In 1995, the ICTR began hunting for the participators of the genocide. This particular task made it difficult because the whereabouts of many suspects were unknown. The trials continued over the next year in a half, which inlcuded the 2008 declaration of guilt of three of the former senior Rwandan defense officials for their role of organizing the genocide.