Because cattle were more valuable than crops, the minority Tutsis became the local elite. By the time Belgium took over the land in from Germany who took it in , 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 , 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 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. By early 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. 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. 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 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. In hindsight, there's a good chance the UN could have done something. General Dallaire believes that, with an extra 5, troops and a stronger UN mandate, he could have saved " hundreds of thousands. 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.
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.
Every person inside Rwanda visited by a Tutsi refugee would be followed by state agents and automatically branded an RPF sympathiser; many were arrested, tortured, and killed by Rwandan government operatives. Five years later, they would be crushed altogether in one of the worst genocides ever recorded. O n the morning of 1 October , thousands of RPF fighters gathered in a football stadium in western Uganda about 20 miles from the Rwandan border.
Two nearby hospitals were readied for casualties. They crossed into Rwanda that afternoon. The Rwandan army, with help from French and Zairean commandos, stopped their advance and the rebels retreated back into Uganda. But a few days after that, he quietly requested France and Belgium not to assist the Rwandan government in repelling the invasion.
Cohen writes that he now believes that Museveni must have been feigning shock, when he knew what was going on all along. Museveni had already issued a statement promising to seal all Uganda—Rwanda border crossings, provide no assistance to the RPF and arrest any rebels who tried to return to Uganda. But he proceeded to do none of those things and the Americans appear to have made no objection.
But after four RPF commanders were killed, he told his American instructors that he was dropping out to join the Rwandan invasion. The Americans apparently supported this decision and Kagame flew into Entebbe airport, travelled to the Rwandan border by road, and crossed over to take command of the rebels. When a Ugandan journalist published an article in the government-owned New Vision newspaper revealing the existence of these bases, Museveni threatened to charge the journalist and his editor with sedition.
The entire border area was cordoned off. Even a French and Italian military inspection team was denied access. In October , the UN security council authorised a peacekeeping force to ensure no weapons crossed the border.
Dallaire protested: the element of surprise is crucial for such monitoring missions. But the Ugandans insisted and eventually, Dallaire, who was much more concerned about developments inside Rwanda, gave up.
The border was a sieve anyway, as Dallaire later wrote. There were five official crossing sites and countless unmapped mountain trails. It was impossible to monitor. Dallaire had also heard that an arsenal in Mbarara, a Ugandan town about 80 miles from the Rwanda border, was being used to supply the RPF.
In , Dallaire told a US congressional hearing that Museveni had laughed in his face when they met at a gathering to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the genocide. In , Uganda purchased 10 times more US weapons than in the preceding 40 years combined. But negotiations appear to have been abandoned abruptly in favour of war. At least one American was concerned about this. After the invasion, hundreds of thousands of mostly Hutu villagers fled RPF-held areas, saying they had seen abductions and killings.
We encouraged nascent democratic initiatives. We supported a full range of economic reforms. But the US was not fostering nascent democratic initiatives inside Uganda. And far from seeking stability, the US, by allowing Uganda to arm the RPF, was setting the stage for what would turn out to be the worst outbreak of violence ever recorded on the African continent.
Years later, Cohen expressed regret for failing to pressure Uganda to stop supporting the RPF, but by then it was far too late. For Habyarimana and his circle of Hutu elites, the RPF invasion seemed to have a silver lining, at least at first. Habyarimana had sought reconciliation with the Tutsis still living in Rwanda by reserving civil service jobs and university places for them in proportion to their share of the population.
This programme was modestly successful, and the greatest tensions in the country now lay along class, not ethnic, lines. International aid donors had pressured Habyarimana to allow opposition political parties to operate, and many new ones had sprung up.
Shortly after the invasion, all Tutsis — whether RPF supporters or not — became targets of a vicious propaganda campaign that would bear hideous fruit in April Chauvinist Hutu newspapers, magazines and radio programmes began reminding Hutu audiences that they were the original occupants of the Great Lakes region and that Tutsis were Nilotics — supposedly warlike pastoralists from Ethiopia who had conquered and enslaved them in the 17th century.
The RPF invasion was nothing more than a plot by Museveni, Kagame and their Tutsi co-conspirators to re-establish this evil Nilotic empire. The genocide against the Tutsi was over in roughly days. But the brutal violence committed against this minority ethnic and social group was preceded by decades of hatred incited against them. They were presented as inferior to Hutu, and dangerous to the nation of Rwanda. This process reminds us of the need to be vigilant against propaganda that seeks to single out certain groups for persecution, portraying them as less worthy of human rights than others.
When we begin to hear speeches that dehumanize or treat people like animals, vermin, cockroaches, less than nothing, the alarm bells should go off … We begin to classify, to pit people against each other, us against them. These are signals that do not lie, and I think that at any stage that leads us to genocide, we need to find preventive mechanisms. So it's important to react quickly and not wait until the bomb explodes.
How do I ensure my voice is heard when I see an atrocity happening outside my country? What led to the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda? First-hand accounts from survivors. Tags for What led to the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda?
Story Human rights violations. Photo: Associated Press, Joao Silva. Share this Story Facebook - will open in a new tab Facebook Twitter - will open in a new tab Twitter. A colonial legacy of division. Video: Jacques Rwirangira — Things have changed. Exiled Tutsi push for the right to return home. Video: Bonaventure Kalisa — Careful of your neighbour. Assassination leads to explosion of hostilities.
View image in fullscreen gallery. The genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Video: Dada Gasirabo — When the plane was shot down.
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