Rwandan Genocide 1994: One Hundred Days of Mass Killing

The Rwandan genocide was the mass murder of an estimated 500,000 to 800,000 people, the great majority of them Tutsi, by Hutu extremist forces in Rwanda between April and July 1994. In about one hundred days, government officials, soldiers and militias, joined by many ordinary citizens, killed roughly three-quarters of the country’s Tutsi population, as well as Hutu who opposed the killing. The world’s failure to stop it became one of the defining moral failures of the late twentieth century.

Origins

Rwanda is a small, densely populated country in Central Africa. Before colonial rule its people were divided into Hutu, the majority, Tutsi and a small Twa minority. They spoke the same language, Kinyarwanda, and shared the same culture and religion, but Tutsi were associated with cattle ownership and the ruling elite, and the categories were fluid.

German and then Belgian colonial rulers treated Tutsi as a separate and superior race and governed through a Tutsi elite. In the 1930s the Belgians introduced identity cards that recorded every Rwandan’s ethnic group, turning a social distinction into a fixed label. In the late 1950s, as independence approached, the Belgians switched support to the Hutu majority. Violence from 1959 onwards drove tens of thousands of Tutsi into exile, and Rwanda became independent in 1962 under a Hutu-dominated government. Further waves of anti-Tutsi violence followed in the 1960s and early 1970s.

In 1973 Major General Juvénal Habyarimana seized power and ruled through a single party. Tutsi faced discrimination in education and public jobs, and exiles were denied the right to return.

Civil war and preparation

On 1 October 1990 the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel army formed mainly by Tutsi exiles in Uganda, invaded northern Rwanda. The war hardened attitudes. Extremists within Habyarimana’s circle, known as Hutu Power, used newspapers such as Kangura and, from 1993, the radio station RTLM (Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines) to portray all Tutsi as enemies, calling them inyenzi (“cockroaches”). Youth militias known as Interahamwe (“those who attack together”) were trained and armed, and lists of targets were drawn up. Several massacres of Tutsi took place in 1990-1993.

Under international pressure, Habyarimana signed the Arusha Accords with the RPF on 4 August 1993, providing for power-sharing and the integration of the armies. A UN peacekeeping force, UNAMIR, commanded by Canadian General Roméo Dallaire, was sent to oversee the deal. In January 1994 Dallaire warned UN headquarters in a cable that an informant had revealed plans to exterminate Tutsi and to provoke the withdrawal of Belgian peacekeepers; he was told not to raid the arms caches.

The genocide

The trigger

On the evening of 6 April 1994 the plane carrying President Habyarimana and Burundi’s President Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down as it approached Kigali airport, killing everyone on board. Responsibility for the attack has never been established and remains disputed.

Within hours, the Presidential Guard and militias set up roadblocks in Kigali and began killing. On 7 April they murdered the moderate Hutu Prime Minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, along with other opposition leaders, and ten Belgian peacekeepers who had been guarding her. A crisis committee in which Colonel Théoneste Bagosora played a leading role took control, and an interim government was formed that organised the slaughter.

One hundred days

The killing spread across the country, organised through the state’s administrative structures, from prefects down to local officials. Militias manned roadblocks, checking identity cards and killing those identified as Tutsi. Radio broadcasts named targets and urged people to “work”, a euphemism for killing. Many killers were ordinary farmers who were pressured, paid or threatened into taking part.

Tutsi sought refuge in churches, schools and stadiums, as they had in earlier waves of violence. These places became sites of some of the largest massacres, including at Nyamata, Ntarama, Murambi and Kibuye, where thousands were killed at a time. Sexual violence was used systematically; the UN has estimated that between 250,000 and 500,000 women and girls were raped. Some Hutu risked their lives to hide neighbours, and moderate Hutu who refused to participate were themselves killed.

The failure of the international community

UNAMIR had about 2,500 troops when the genocide began, but no mandate to use force to protect civilians. After the murder of its soldiers, Belgium withdrew its contingent, and on 21 April the UN Security Council voted to reduce the force to about 270. Foreign governments sent troops only to evacuate their own citizens. Members of the Security Council, including the United States, avoided using the word “genocide”, which would have raised expectations of action, and the failed mission in Somalia the previous October weighed heavily on decision-makers.

In mid-May the UN authorised a larger force, but it did not arrive in time. In June France launched Operation Turquoise, establishing a zone in the south-west; it saved some lives but remains controversial because France had been a close ally of the Habyarimana government and the zone allowed some perpetrators to escape.

How it ended

The RPF, commanded by Paul Kagame, resumed its offensive as soon as the killing began. It took Kigali on 4 July 1994, a date now marked as Liberation Day, and most of the country by mid-July. Fearing reprisals and urged on by their leaders, around two million Hutu fled into Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Tanzania and Burundi. Cholera and dysentery killed tens of thousands in the camps around Goma. RPF soldiers also committed killings of civilians during and after the war, which have received far less investigation.

The survivors faced a devastated country. Many had lost almost their entire families; tens of thousands of children were orphaned, and many women who had been raped were left with HIV or with children born of rape. Survivors frequently returned to villages where neighbours who had taken part in the killings also lived. Rwanda’s prisons soon held well over 100,000 genocide suspects, far more than its ruined courts could ever try, a problem that eventually led to the creation of the community gacaca courts.

By the numbers

Key people

• Juvénal Habyarimana – President of Rwanda from 1973, whose death on 6 April triggered the genocide.
• Théoneste Bagosora – Army officer who took control after the president’s death; convicted of genocide by the UN tribunal.
• Agathe Uwilingiyimana – Prime Minister murdered on 7 April 1994.
• Roméo Dallaire – UNAMIR commander who warned of the danger and stayed throughout.
• Paul Kagame – RPF commander whose forces ended the genocide; later President of Rwanda.

Justice, aftermath and legacy

The UN Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in November 1994, sitting in Arusha, Tanzania. In 1998 it delivered the first conviction for genocide by an international court, of Jean-Paul Akayesu, and was the first to recognise rape as an act of genocide. Former Prime Minister Jean Kambanda pleaded guilty to genocide, the first head of government to be convicted of the crime. In the so-called Media Case of 2003, the tribunal convicted founders of RTLM and the editor of Kangura, establishing that hate propaganda could amount to direct and public incitement to commit genocide. In all, the ICTR indicted 93 people before it closed in 2015, and some fugitives were arrested decades later. Inside Rwanda, more than a million cases were heard by community gacaca courts between 2002 and 2012.

The flight of perpetrators into Zaire helped ignite wars in the Congo, including the Second Congo War, with devastating consequences for the region. In 1998 US President Bill Clinton visited Kigali and acknowledged that the world had not acted quickly enough, and a UN inquiry in 1999 condemned the organisation’s failures.

Rwanda commemorates the genocide each year from 7 April, a period known as Kwibuka (“remember”). Memorials such as the Kigali Genocide Memorial, where more than 250,000 victims are buried, preserve the evidence. The post-genocide government abolished ethnic categories on identity cards and promotes a single Rwandan identity, while critics argue that its policies also limit political debate. The genocide, together with the Srebrenica massacre a year later, led to the international principle of the “Responsibility to Protect”, adopted by the UN in 2005.

Timeline

• 1990, 1 October: The RPF invades northern Rwanda, starting the civil war.
• 1993, 4 August: The Arusha Accords are signed.
• 1994, 11 January: Dallaire’s cable warns UN headquarters of extermination plans.
• 1994, 6 April: President Habyarimana’s plane is shot down over Kigali.
• 1994, 7 April: The Prime Minister and ten Belgian peacekeepers are killed; mass killings begin.
• 1994, 21 April: The UN Security Council cuts UNAMIR to about 270 troops.
• 1994, 22 June: France’s Operation Turquoise is authorised.
• 1994, 4 July: The RPF captures Kigali.
• 1994, 8 November: The UN creates the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Why it matters

The Rwandan genocide showed how a state can mobilise ordinary people to murder their neighbours, and how quickly it can happen when propaganda, organisation and impunity combine. It remains a central case in the study of genocide and a warning about the cost of international inaction.