Document 3

About the Rwandan Genocide

On 6 April 1994, the eyes of the world turned to the
small, poor African nation of Rwanda. In the aftermath of
the assassination of President Juvnal Habyarimana, the
ethnic Hutu majority began a deliberate, carefully
orchestrated campaign to eliminate the Tutsi minority in
any way possible.
There had been warning signs. The Tutsi were generally
richer and more educated. When the Belgians gained
control of Rwanda, they gave Tutsis all the positions of
power. With Rwandas independence, Hutus took control
of the government and, to say the least, held a grudge.
Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were
isolated massacres of Tutsis. A system of ID cards was
put in place in which one of the fields was ethnicity. In
1990, a Tutsi-dominated rebel group, the Rwandan
Patriotic Front, invaded Rwanda from neighboring
Uganda, triggering more animosity. The R.P.F.s
resilience spawned the nickname inyenzi, meaning
cockroaches. Racial slurs, hate media and bigoted
propaganda escalated tensions to the point where
political parties were forming militias and practically
waiting for something to ignite the powder keg that was
Rwanda.
The spark, as it happened, came in the form of the
assassination of Rwandas longtime president and racial
hardliner, Juvnal Habyarimana. Who exactly fired the
rocket that hit his plane as it came into land in Kigali is a
mystery that has never been fully investigated. Though
many assumed that it was the R.P.F., it is equally likely
that it was a Hutu extremist angered by the presidents
comparatively conciliatory policies. In any case, it took
only hours for armed gangs to begin circulating through
the capital with the names and addresses of all Tutsis in
each district, knocking on doors and murdering those
inside. In the following weeks the slaughter spread
throughout the rest of the country, the weapon of choice
being the machete.
Unamir, the United Nations Assistance Mission for
Rwanda, was unable to do much to help. The force had
been sent in to enforce a peace deal with the R.P.F., and
its mandate did not allow for any real fighting. Worse,
when ten Belgian peacekeepers protecting the moderate
prime minister were brutally murdered, the U.N.
Security Council voted to reduce Unamirs size by 90%,
leaving Commander Romo Dallaire with only 270
soldiers for all of Rwanda. Not until the genocide was
winding down was an adequate force approved.
Through all this, the R.P.F. was advancing through
Rwanda and scoring repeated victories against the
Rwandan Army. In early July, they captured Kigali. Two
weeks later, they forced the Hutu Power government into
then-Zare, ending the genocide within Rwandas
borders, though it continued outside. They appointed a
Hutu president and a Tutsi vice president and stabilized
the country. However, post-genocide Rwanda was the
poorest country in the world and a land scarred by the
events of the past hundred days. Its cities and economy
were in ruins. Its streets, homes and fields were filled
with the corpses of the estimated 937,000 victims. Those
who survived were wounded, if not physically then
mentally, for years to come.
There were several things which made the Rwandan
Genocide especially horrifying, even in a century shared
with Cambodia, Bosnia, Armenia and the Holocaust. For
one thing, not only Tutsis were killed. The media
invented the term ibyitso, meaning accomplices, for
anyone who supported the R.P.F., sympathized with
Tutsis or even simply disagreed with the hard-line
ideology of the masses. Having a small nose or wearing
eyeglasses was often enough to be murdered. Another
thing was that the Rwandan media did not object to any
of this. State-sponsored and private radio stations as well
as several newspapers were in a large part responsible
for prodding the nation in the direction of butchery. They
did little to hide their opinions, running reports openly
inciting people to look at his [the Tutsis] small nose
and break it, and headlines like What Weapons Will We
Use to Eliminate the Cockroaches Once and for All?
written over a machete. The radio in particular was the
most efficient way of connecting to many Rwandans, and
it was the radio which, among many other things,
warned people of invented atrocities to which they would
fall victim at the hands of the R.P.F., creating a swarm of
people running towards Zare ahead of the advancing
rebels, contributing to a humanitarian disaster which is
still not over.
Through all of this, the international community stood by
and did nothing. The U.N. Security Council actually
withdrew troops from Rwanda when the killing began,
and gave Unamir a mandate which did not allow it to
adequately protect civilians. Many also point to the
United States as a power which could have done
something. There were enough troops in Entebbe,
Uganda, and other nearby bases to have several
thousand troops on the ground fairly quickly. The U.S., as
well as Belgium and France, did send troops in to rescue
their citizens living in Rwanda, but not to help anyone
else. Late in the genocide, a coalition of eight
neighboring countries put together an intervention force,
and only needed troop transports from Washington. The
transports were approved, but due to red tape ended up
sitting on an airstrip in Germany and never reaching
their destination.
Rwanda, above all others, was a preventable genocide.
There were so many warnings, so many opportunities to
stop it, so many missed chances. Even after it was
underway, much could have been done to lighten its
effects but was not. The result was the most efficient
mass killing in history after the atomic bombs, with one
Rwandan dying every nine or ten seconds. Schools are
careful to teach extensively the lessons of the Holocaust,
but often give slim treatment to the lessons of Rwanda,
which are in some ways more horrifying and in many
ways more relevant. The 1994 genocide took place in a
world very similar to the one we live in now, and many of
the entities which watched it unfold and did nothing still
exist largely unchanged. If we do not take these mistakes
to heart and make sure that they never happen again, it
means that they can.