essay on rwanda genocide

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Rwandan Genocide

By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 19, 2023 | Original: October 14, 2009

During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, also known as 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda, members of the Hutu ethnic majority in the east-central African nation of Rwanda murdered as many as 800,000 people, mostly of the Tutsi minority. Started by Hutu nationalists in the capital of Kigali, the genocide spread throughout the country with shocking speed and brutality, as ordinary citizens were incited by local officials and the Hutu Power government to take up arms against their neighbors. By the time the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front gained control of the country through a military offensive in early July, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were dead and 2 million refugees (mainly Hutus) fled Rwanda, exacerbating what had already become a full-blown humanitarian crisis.

Rwandan Ethnic Tensions

By the early 1990s, Rwanda, a small country with an overwhelmingly agricultural economy, had one of the highest population densities in Africa. About 85 percent of its population was Hutu; the rest were Tutsi, along with a small number of Twa, a Pygmy group who were the original inhabitants of Rwanda.

Part of German East Africa from 1897 to 1918, Rwanda became a Belgian trusteeship under a  League of Nations mandate after World War I , along with neighboring Burundi.

Rwanda’s colonial period, during which the ruling Belgians favored the minority Tutsis over the Hutus, exacerbated the tendency of the few to oppress the many, creating a legacy of tension that exploded into violence even before Rwanda gained its independence.

A Hutu revolution in 1959 forced as many as 330,000 Tutsis to flee the country, making them an even smaller minority. By early 1961, victorious Hutus had forced Rwanda’s Tutsi monarch into exile and declared the country a republic. After a United Nations referendum that same year, Belgium officially granted independence to Rwanda in July 1962.

Ethnically motivated violence continued in the years following independence. In 1973, a military group installed Major General Juvenal Habyarimana, a moderate Hutu, in power.

The sole leader of the Rwandan government for the next two decades, Habyarimana founded a new political party, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (NRMD). He was elected president under a new constitution ratified in 1978 and reelected in 1983 and 1988 when he was the sole candidate.

In 1990, forces of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), consisting mainly of Tutsi refugees, invaded Rwanda from Uganda. Habyarimana accused Tutsi residents of being RPF accomplices and arrested hundreds of them. Between 1990 and 1993, government officials directed massacres of the Tutsi, killing hundreds. A ceasefire in these hostilities led to negotiations between the government and the RPF in 1992, resulting in the Arusha Peace Accords.

In August 1993, Habyarimana signed an agreement at Arusha, Tanzania, calling for the creation of a transition government that would include the RPF.

This power-sharing agreement angered Hutu extremists, who would soon take swift and horrible action to prevent it.

Rwandan Genocide Begins

On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying Habyarimana and Burundi’s president Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down over the capital city of Kigali, leaving no survivors. (It has never been conclusively determined who the culprits were. Some have blamed Hutu extremists, while others blamed leaders of the RPF.)

Within an hour of the plane crash, the Presidential Guard, together with members of the Rwandan armed forces (FAR) and Hutu militia groups known as the Interahamwe (“Those Who Attack Together”) and Impuzamugambi (“Those Who Have the Same Goal”), set up roadblocks and barricades and began slaughtering Tutsis and moderate Hutus with impunity.

Among the first victims of the genocide were the moderate Hutu Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and 10 Belgian peacekeepers, killed on April 7. This violence created a political vacuum, into which an interim government of extremist Hutu Power leaders from the military high command stepped on April 9. The killing of the Belgian peacekeepers, meanwhile, provoked the withdrawal of Belgian troops. And the U.N. directed that peacekeepers only defend themselves thereafter.

Slaughter Spreads Across Rwanda

The mass killings in Kigali quickly spread from that city to the rest of Rwanda. In the first two weeks, local administrators in central and southern Rwanda, where most Tutsi lived, resisted the genocide. After April 18, national officials removed the resisters and killed several of them. Other opponents then fell silent or actively led the killing. Officials rewarded killers with food, drink, drugs and money. Government-sponsored radio stations started calling on ordinary Rwandan civilians to murder their neighbors. Within three months, some 800,000 people had been slaughtered.

Meanwhile, the RPF resumed fighting, and civil war raged alongside the genocide. By early July, RPF forces had gained control over most of country, including Kigali.

In response, more than 2 million people, nearly all Hutus, fled Rwanda, crowding into refugee camps in the Congo (then called Zaire) and other neighboring countries.

After its victory, the RPF established a coalition government similar to that agreed upon at Arusha, with Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu, as president and Paul Kagame, a Tutsi, as vice president and defense minister.

Habyarimana’s NRMD party, which had played a key role in organizing the genocide, was outlawed, and a new constitution adopted in 2003 eliminated reference to ethnicity. The new constitution was followed by Kagame’s election to a 10-year term as Rwanda’s president and the country’s first-ever legislative elections.

International Response

As in the case of atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia around the same time, the international community largely remained on the sidelines during the Rwandan genocide.

A United Nations Security Council vote in April 1994 led to the withdrawal of most of a U.N. peacekeeping operation (UNAMIR), created the previous fall to aid with governmental transition under the Arusha accord. 

As reports of the genocide spread, the Security Council voted in mid-May to supply a more robust force, including more than 5,000 troops. By the time that force arrived in full, however, the genocide had been over for months.

In a separate French intervention approved by the U.N., French troops entered Rwanda from Zaire in late June. In the face of the RPF’s rapid advance, they limited their intervention to a “humanitarian zone” set up in southwestern Rwanda, saving tens of thousands of Tutsi lives but also helping some of the genocide’s plotters—allies of the French during the Habyarimana administration—to escape.

In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, many prominent figures in the international community lamented the outside world’s general obliviousness to the situation and its failure to act in order to prevent the atrocities from taking place.

As former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali told the PBS news program Frontline : “The failure of Rwanda is 10 times greater than the failure of Yugoslavia. Because in Yugoslavia the international community was interested, was involved. In Rwanda nobody was interested.”

Attempts were later made to rectify this passivity. After the RFP victory, the UNAMIR operation was brought back up to strength; it remained in Rwanda until March 1996, as one of the largest humanitarian relief efforts in history.

Did you know? In September 1998, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) issued the first conviction for genocide after a trial, declaring Jean-Paul Akayesu guilty for acts he engaged in and oversaw as mayor of the Rwandan town of Taba.

Rwandan Genocide Trials

In October 1994, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), located in Tanzania, was established as an extension of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, the first international tribunal since the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, and the first with the mandate to prosecute the crime of genocide.

In 1995, the ICTR began indicting and trying a number of higher-ranking people for their role in the Rwandan genocide; the process was made more difficult because the whereabouts of many suspects were unknown.

The trials continued over the next decade and a half, including the 2008 conviction of three former senior Rwandan defense and military officials for organizing the genocide.

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The Rwanda Genocide

Genocides have continued to occur since the Holocaust. This was the case, for example, in Rwanda in 1994. Over a period of 100 days, from April to July 1994, as many as one million people, mostly Tutsis, were massacred. This occurred when an extremist-led Hutu government launched a plan to wipe out Rwanda’s entire Tutsi minority and any others who opposed its policies.

From April to July 1994, extremist leaders of Rwanda’s Hutu majority directed a genocide against the country’s Tutsi minority.

Killings occurred openly throughout Rwanda on roads and in fields, churches, schools, government buildings, and homes. Entire families were killed at a time.

In response to the violence, the United Nations established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) to bring to justice those accused of high level crimes.

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Rwanda was ruled by leaders of the Hutu majority from the time it gained independence in 1962 until the genocide in 1994. During this period, the country’s Tutsi minority suffered systematic discrimination. They were also the targets of periodic outbreaks of mass violence. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsis fled the country in the 1960s and 1970s. 

In 1990, a Tutsi rebel force invaded Rwanda from the north. Hard-line Hutu politicians accused Rwandan Tutsis of supporting the rebels. After the war reached a stalemate, Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana signed a peace agreement. The terms enabled Rwanda to transition to a government in which Hutus and Tutsis would share power. The agreement angered Hutu extremists. In response, they armed Hutu paramilitary forces and waged a vicious propaganda campaign against the Tutsis.

The One Hundred Day Genocide

On the evening of April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana was killed. A surface-to-air missile shot down his plane as it was landing in Kigali, the Rwandan capital. Who fired the missile remains in dispute. However, extremist leaders of Rwanda’s Hutu majority seized the assassination as the opportunity to launch a carefully planned campaign to wipe out the country’s Tutsis. They also targeted moderate Hutu leaders who might have opposed this program of genocide . 

Political and other high profile leaders who might have been able to prevent the genocide were killed immediately. Violence spread through the capital and into the rest of the country. The genocide continued for roughly three months. 

As the level of violence escalated, groups of Tutsis fled to places that in previous times of turmoil had provided safety: churches, schools, and government buildings. Many of these refuges became the sites of major massacres. The Rwandan military and Hutu paramilitary forces carried out the massacres using guns and explosives. 

In addition to mass killings, thousands and thousands of Tutsis and people suspected of being Tutsis were killed in their homes and fields and on the road. Militias set up roadblocks across the country to prevent the victims from escaping. In cities, towns, and even the tiniest villages, Hutus answered the call of their local leaders to murder their Tutsi neighbors. Entire families were killed at a time, often hacked to death with machetes. Women were systematically and brutally raped. 

Hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Hutus participated in the genocide. As many as one million people, mostly Tutsis, were slaughtered in 100 days.

The genocide ended when the Tutsi-dominated rebel movement, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), captured Kigali. The RPF overthrew the Hutu government and seized power. The new government announced a policy of “unity and reconciliation.” It adopted a new constitution that guaranteed equal rights for all Rwandans regardless of their group. 

More than one million Hutus, including many of the genocidaires, fled to neighboring countries. In Zaire, today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the refugees’ presence helped spark two international conflicts and ongoing insurgencies. More than five million people have died in the violence.

On September 2, 1998, the ICTR delivered the first conviction for genocide by an international court. It ruled that Jean-Paul Akayesu was guilty of inciting and leading acts of violence against Tutsi civilians in the town where he served as mayor. This judgment was also the first by an international court to define rape as a crime in international law and to recognize rape as a means of committing genocide.

In another landmark case, the ICTR convicted a newspaper publisher and a radio station owner of the crime of incitement to genocide (a third defendant was found guilty as well, but was acquitted on appeal). It was the first time since the Nuremberg trial of the major German war criminals that an international court examined the responsibility of the media for mass atrocities.  

In all, the ICTR indicted 93 persons and convicted 62 for crimes in connection with the genocide. Those prosecuted included high-level military and government officials, politicians and businessmen, and religious, media, and militia leaders.  

Within Rwanda, the national courts tried more than 10,000 persons for planning the genocide or committing atrocities. In 2005, the government also implemented the traditional community court system known as gacaca (pronounced ga-CHA-cha). These courts heard the cases of the additional hundreds of thousands of Rwandans accused of participating in the genocide. In communities throughout the country, locally elected judges heard victims and witnesses testify. The judges also gave the defendants the opportunity to confess and ask for forgiveness. The gacaca courts tried more than 1.2 million cases before they closed in 2012.

Critical Thinking Questions

• Investigate the world and UN responses to the events in Rwanda.
• Why would the label of genocide be opposed or denied by other countries?
• How might citizens and officials within a nation identify and respond to warning signs of genocide or mass atrocity? What obstacles might be faced?
• How might other countries and international organizations respond to warning signs within a nation? What obstacles may exist?

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Essay: The Long Cultural Legacy of the Rwandan Genocide

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The Long Cultural Legacy of the Rwandan Genocide

Over 30 years, the event became synonymous with the moral failures of a state-bound foreign-policy order..

Beginning 30 years ago this month, the Rwandan genocide unfolded quickly between April 7 and July 15, 1994. In that short time, an estimated 500,000-800,000 people were killed.

When Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down on April 6, 1994, a crisis committee of Hutu extremists managed to seize power. They murdered Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a moderate Hutu, and launched a campaign of slaughter against the Tutsis. Early calls for intervention by international observers were ignored and deflected . Instead, states sought to engage with the extremists, encouraging them to implement the Arusha Accords that had been agreed to the previous August. The failure of the United Nations to expand the remit of its peacekeepers on the ground—hamstrung by a Chapter 6 mandate that limited its activities to implement the Arusha Accords—left soldiers powerless to stop the killing happening right in front of them. The murder of 10 Belgian U.N. troops brought back flashbacks of the deaths of 18 U.S. troops in another U.N. mission in Somalia in 1993. Two weeks after the genocide began, and despite daily coverage of the situation in newspapers around the world, the U.N. Security Council reduced the U.N. troop presence in Rwanda from 2,500 to 250. The genocide continued unabated, stopping only when the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by Paul Kagame, arrived in Kigali and then pursued the génocidaires to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

Rwanda became shorthand for the moral failures of a state-bound, realist foreign-policy order. The U.N. processes relied too much on being invited in by sovereign states. Humanitarian legal scholar Fernando Tesón argued in his 2001 paper “The Liberal Case for Humanitarian Intervention” that “external intervention is (at least) morally permissible to end that injustice” of “governmental tyranny.” In this case, it seemed that politics—international and domestic—had gotten in the way of saving human lives, and it was this conviction that shaped both politics and culture around the topic of foreign intervention for the next 30 years.

An Ethiopian soldier of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda stands near thousands of refugees gathered in the border town of Cyangugu, Rwanda, on Aug. 20, 1994. Hector Mata/AFP via Getty Images

Frustrated by government inaction, people turned to charities and took matters into their own hands. Films, books, and new NGOs alike celebrated individual acts of heroic intervention in Africa. But states also responded to growing cultural pressure to avoid another Rwanda. The trend built slowly at first and then reached its pop culture peak between 2005 and 2011.

Black Hawk Down , a film about the failed 1993 intervention in Somalia, was released at the very end of 2001. The U.S. forces are depicted as morally right, there to oust an illegitimate, apolitical warlord who was allowing Somali people to starve. The film’s protagonist explains: “We can either help, or we can sit back and watch the country destroy itself on CNN.” The general who initiated the Battle of Mogadishu argues with his Somali counterpart, citing, “300,000 dead and counting. That’s not a war … that’s genocide.”

Hotel Rwanda , released in 2004, tells the story of the genocide from the perspective of one man: Paul Rusesabagina, a Rwandan Oskar Schindler. It was perhaps meaningful that Schindler’s List had been released only a few months before the Rwandan genocide began, influencing much of the debate in the press about whether or not Rwanda should be termed a genocide or whether “tribal” or “ethnic” warfare was more appropriate. For a generation born at the end of America’s Vietnam “quagmire,” the lessons from that conflict seemed less relevant than the stories of U.S. inaction in the early days of the Holocaust. Instead, they turned to the moral clarity offered by the bravery of individuals such as Rusesabagina in Rwanda or Schindler in Germany.

Rwanda Isn’t the Safe Haven the U.K. Wants

For Rwandan President Paul Kagame, the deal is not only a cash cow—it also helps him to escape accountability for Rwanda’s violent past.

The Dark Side of Rwanda’s Rebirth

A new book explores the historical roots and contemporary fallout of Paul Kagame’s aggressive foreign policy.

Outside Powers Are Making the Conflict in the Central African Republic Worse

Proxy wars pitting France and Chad against Russia and Rwanda threaten to destabilize the entire region while subjecting Central Africans to more violence and instability.

Reporters during the Rwandan genocide had found Americans’ ability to look away frustrating—a San Francisco Examiner article in July 1994 complained that “we are better at avoiding pain than anybody else on Earth.” Blood Diamond , released in 2006, is set during Sierra Leone’s civil war. In the film, while Leonardo DiCaprio has the antihero’s arc, Jennifer Connelly’s hard-elbowed reporter is the true hero of the story, not only reporting but effecting an international agreement about diamond certification.

This emphasis on witnessing and raising awareness fit well with the rising star of Doctors Without Borders. The organization’s working principles included “a duty to raise awareness of their plight to ultimately help improve their situation.” Doctors Without Borders had generated interest when it explicitly called for military intervention in Rwanda. Although it had been founded after the 1968 Biafran crisis and had operated in a number of different conflict zones since, its popularity took off after Rwanda, and it even featured in an Oscar-nominated documentary in 2008. Its remit —to work in areas in crisis or conflict “based solely on … independent assessment of medical needs,” with impartiality and neutrality—was an attractive one for a new generation horrified by states’ willingness to regard national sovereignty as paramount and to base decisions about intervention on party political considerations.

A French doctor from Doctors Without Borders treats an 8-month-old baby in western Darfur, Sudan, on Oct. 29, 2004. Chris Bouroncle/AFP via Getty Images

Doctors Without Borders’ mission was a blueprint for the delivery of all kinds of aid and assistance, building to a “without borders” fever pitch in the early 2000s: Aviation Without Borders, Translators Without Borders, Reporters Without Borders, World Chefs Without Borders, Libraries Without Borders, Geoscientists Without Borders, Statistics Without Borders. In the humanitarian space, it was clear that borders were the problem. Borders gave sovereign states the ability to decline U.N. interventions. Borders were anachronistic in an era of globalization, when, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair explained in April 1999, “many of our domestic problems are caused on the other side of the world.”

Africa in particular became a focus for concerns about the effect of borders on creating an impermeable legal sovereignty that protected genocidal states. Preexisting Western perceptions of the illegitimacy of African states, and of the continent’s people suffering as victims of global politics, became the foundation for intervention. Rwanda’s genocide had been explained away in some circles as being a “tribal” conflict, an “old power struggle” as the Herald-Sun in Durham, North Carolina, explained at the time. But for others, the genocide was described as the legacy of a colonialism that created ethnicities to divide and rule and then left them trapped within the same fake, colonial borders after independence. “Belgium’s policy was explicitly racist,” reported the Beacon Journal in Akron, Ohio, in June 1994. Both of these positions framed African nation-states as inorganic constructs that were meaningless except to the corrupt governments that abused their people. John Stremlau, a former U.S. State Department official, argued in 2000 that wars in “[w]eak, authoritarian African governments” resulted “from bad governance.” Lord of War (2005), Sahara (2005), and The Last King of Scotland (2006) all caricatured power-hungry, emotionally unstable African dictators. And so it was “our responsibility” to protect Africa’s victims from Africa’s warlords.

Individualizing that responsibility was celebrated in the pop culture depictions of African crises. In The Constant Gardener (2005), Rachel Weisz’s character wants to help a family that had been in the hospital with her, but she is told that “there are millions of people. They all need help.” She responds: “Yeah, but these are three people that we can help.” In 2006, Dave Eggers published the novel What Is the What , based on the true story of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese refugee. It soon became freshman reading at universities across the United States. Book clubs were invited to reflect on the book’s closing lines, which address the reader, “All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist.” It also became the basis for a new NGO focused on children in Africa, seeded with the proceeds from the book.

In the United States, charitable donations to NGOs reached a dramatic new peak in 2005-06. ForDarfur.org was set up by some college students in 2007 to raise awareness through a series of concerts, raising more than $1 million for Doctors Without Borders. A 2010 report noted that, worldwide, NGOs “raise more money for development assistance than the entire UN system.” The philosopher Peter Singer worried in 2006 about how much a human life was worth and whether paying for it ourselves through philanthropy was preferable to the state using taxes. When the state paid for humanitarian and development aid, “much of it is directed where it best suits U.S. strategic interests” rather than to moral causes, he argued.

A British soldier trains Sierra Leonean troops at the Benguema training camp in Benguema, Sierra Leone, on Dec. 1, 2000. Alexander Joe/AFP via Getty Images

But this cultural pressure to act morally was building on governments too. In 2000, the British government sent troops to help end Sierra Leone’s civil war . Britain celebrated its success as a new form of “surgical intervention,” leading to a belief in the possibility of robust humanitarian intervention in conflicts around the world—a form of intervention that would stop violence against innocents without taking sides and without casualties. Blair advocated for “just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values.” Even before 9/11, the lessons of the intervention in Sierra Leone seemed to be that, as the journalist Simon Akam explains in The Changing of the Guard: The British Army Since 9/11 , “going far away and trying to do good with a rifle actually works.”

Africa saw 15 new U.N. missions launched between 1994 and 2007, roughly half of the new peacekeeping operations launched between 1994 and 2015. These interventions marked a 123 percent increase on the rate of interventions per year on the preceding period from the end of the World War II. Mentions of “humanitarian intervention” grew by a third between 1994 and 2010 as the concept of “coercive action against a state to protect people within its borders from suffering grave harm” took hold as a separate type of military campaign, distinct from wars and peacekeeping missions.

Samantha Power’s A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide was released in 2002, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and making the argument that the United States failed to intervene in Rwanda because policymakers claimed intervention wasn’t in the “national interest.” Discontent about government failures to intervene—not only in Rwanda but also in the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995—encouraged the campaign for new norms such as the “ Responsibility to Protect ,” or R2P. Led by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty beginning in 2001, the campaign for a U.N. resolution on R2P was an attempt to use international law and institutions to bind states into universal promises to intervene in other states during humanitarian crises. R2P attempted to take the politics out of the state’s decision-making. Although genocide prevention had been a principle that came out of World War II, the U.N.-guaranteed inviolability of sovereign authority had made intervening in a potential genocide committed by the state difficult and unilateral intervention nearly impossible. R2P, adopted in 2005, meant that if a state was seen to be committing atrocities against its population, any other government had the responsibility to intervene on behalf of those suffering. It was an attempt to create a mechanism that would trigger automatic action, to take the politics out of decisions about when and where to intervene. Calling attention to genocide would trigger action.

The Save Darfur coalition saw itself as that trigger. Founded in 2004 by more than 180 organizations, including the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the coalition framed the crisis in Darfur as something everyone could agree on as an atrocity with no political angle—unlike, for instance, Iraq. It encouraged both college students who identified with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and “communities of faith” to reach out to their representatives in Congress or become a “Darfur ambassador” to raise funds and awareness in their communities and at their universities. Save Darfur developed into a campaign that one scholar called “arguably the largest international social movement since anti-apartheid.”

Actor Mia Farrow (center) walks with radio host Joe Madison (left) and Mohamed Yahya (right) of Darfur as part of a march sponsored by the Save Darfur Coalition to mark International Human Rights Day in Washington on Dec. 10, 2007. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Condoleezza Rice’s plea in the winter of 2000, as an advisor to George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, to abandon the Clintonian idea that “the United States is exercising power legitimately only when it is doing so on behalf of someone or something else” had been jettisoned by Save Darfur’s strange agreement between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists that humanitarianism was apolitical. A petition on the Save Darfur coalition’s website addressed Bush directly, pointing out to him that “during your first year in the White House, you wrote in the margins of a report on the Rwandan genocide, ‘Not on my watch.’” The petition asked the president to “support a stronger multi-national force to protect the civilians of Darfur.” In 2006, Save Darfur organized a rally in Washington, with speakers including Barack Obama, Rusesabagina, and U.S. Marine Corps Capt. Brian Steidle, whose book about the Darfur conflict, The Devil Came on Horseback , was made into a documentary film in 2007. Bush told members of the coalition that they “represent the best of our country.” In 2007, the U.N. arrived in Darfur.

The coalition between the new humanitarianism and military action in Africa was captured in the 2011 film Machine Gun Preacher . It told the story of Sam Childers (played by Gerard Butler), the epitome of the white savior , an American born-again Christian. Childers had, according to his memoir, singlehandedly —and supported by church fundraising back in the United States—raised a militia force in southern Sudan to counter the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army. But soon, a series of exposés, including about Childers , began to erode trust in the model of new humanitarianism. The scandal surrounding the work of Greg Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute in Afghanistan in 2011 was followed by the brief buzz of Invisible Children’s flashy Kony 2012 media campaign to stir up support for U.S. intervention in northern Uganda to overthrow the Lord’s Resistance Army. But Kony 2012, which attempted to capitalize on the sentiment that had driven the earlier intervention period, was met with internet derision and government inaction. Radi-Aid, a Norwegian campaign mocking the charity sector’s depiction of Africa as a continent of victims, was launched in 2012, marking the emergence of skepticism about the deployment of tropes about Africa as a call for action – and fundraising. By 2022, one survey found that less than half of Americans trusted NGOs.

Support for muscular interventionism also began to wane. In 2011, R2P had been invoked officially by the U.N. for the first and only time to authorize intervention in Libya. The results were chaotic. Witnessing the U.S. invocation of a humanitarian responsibility in Iraq and the apparently cynical deployment of R2P in Libya may have put people off. Surgical interventions were rare—more commonly, U.N. peacekeeping missions lasted years, even decades. Soldiers died. And humanitarian aid, delivered neutrally, often meant treating and feeding both victims and their would-be killers. By the time Power, as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., had the president’s ear to do something about civilians being targeted by the Assad regime’s chemical weapons in Syria, the mood had shifted. There would be no U.S. intervention there in 2013. In Africa, the 2014 hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, issued from Nigeria in the wake of the Chibok abductions, generated a 38-person rescue team and an attempted drone intervention, but when they arrived, the scale of the bigger civil war against Boko Haram, and the hundreds of other victims of the militant group’s attacks, dwarfed the search for these specific girls. The hope that interventions and humanitarian aid would end wars was replaced by a cynicism that intervention only escalated them or made them messier. The belief in an ideal, apolitical victim turned out to be a fantasy.

A French soldier keeps a lookout on the street in Gao, Mali, on April 5, 2013. Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images

As the 30th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide approaches, we are witnessing a shift from the post-Rwanda liberal humanitarian legacy in Africa. The Tigray war in Ethiopia and the Sudanese civil war have sparked interest from U.S. policymakers, who have raised concerns about ethnic cleansing. But the default position of the administration and the U.N. has been to speak to the leaders of these countries and work with them in ensuring humanitarian aid access for civilians and pressing for peace talks . In fact, the U.N. has launched only two interventions in Africa since 2007: MINUSMA in Mali in 2013 and MINUSCA in the Central African Republic in 2014. The arrival of the U.N. peacekeepers there followed the intervention of the heads of state of the Economic Community of West African States. They established a framework agreement that would appoint an interim president and transitional government following the conquest of Gao, Timbuktu, and Kidal by armed Islamist groups. That transitional government invited the U.N. to assist with various aspects of rebuilding the state and stabilizing the security situation. The majority of the U.N. troops operating in MINUSMA were from the wider West African region. The U.N. left in December 2023.

While private military contractors from the United States, South Africa, France, and Germany all operate on the continent, scrutiny of Russia’s headline-dominating Wagner Group and its post-Prigozhin incarnation, Africa Corps, suggests that the public perception of these interventions is overwhelmingly negative .

The legacy of Rwanda was the belief that people in the United States and Europe weren’t sufficiently informed about the genocide and that if they had been, they would have pressured their leaders to do the right thing and intervene, something that would have been welcomed by the victims. The legacy of that particular story was potent, shaping humanitarian policy for decades. But the story was also not entirely right. When intervention finally began to be discussed by the United States and France in June 1994, “Rwanda’s Tutsi-led rebel movement denounced it” as politically motivated, the Morning News in Florence, South Carolina, reported.

Rwanda itself has since developed a complicated public image, with Kagame still in power 30 years later and its recent involvement with Britain’s legally contested attempts to resettle migrants. Many of those migrants have come from or traveled through sites of failed interventions . The British government wants to send them to Rwanda because of an increased concern, emanating from critics of globalization on the left and right, about defending borders . People are turning once again to states as sovereign entities to be cajoled and persuaded but with ultimate authority over the policies and politics within their borders. Intervention, on the other hand, means spending political capital. It means choosing a side. And choices about intervention have to reckon with the fact that in war, there is always politics.

Foreign Policy is a releasing a four-episode podcast next month on Paul Rusesabagina, who as a hotel manager in Kigali during the genocide helped save the lives of more than a thousand Rwandans.

Correction, April 8, 2024: A previous version of this article mistakenly stated that there are currently no active U.N. peacekeeping operations in Africa; several missions still remain active. Also, the U.N. has launched two interventions in Africa since 2007, not one. Both errors have been fixed.   

Bronwen Everill is a lecturer in history and fellow of Gonville & Caius College at the University of Cambridge. Most recently, she is the author of Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition . Twitter:  @bronweneverill

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What Rwanda Looks Like 30 Years After the Genocide

Juana Summers

Tinbete Ermyas

Albert Rudatsimburwa, a freelancer journalist reporting in the East African region poses for a portrait in his home. Jacques Nkinzingabo for NPR hide caption

Albert Rudatsimburwa, a freelancer journalist reporting in the East African region poses for a portrait in his home.

It has been three decades since the East African country of Rwanda experienced a genocide that changed the country and shocked the world. We look at the state of their society today.

28 years after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, ‘stain of shame endures’

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The UN paid tribute on Thursday to the one million people who were murdered in 100 days during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, during which moderate Hutu, Twa and others who opposed the genocide, were also killed. 

“We honour their memory. We stand in awe of the resilience of the survivors. And we reflect on our failures as an international community,” Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video message to a virtual event commemorating the 28th International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda .

He reminded the participants that the genocide was “deliberate, systematic – and carried out in broad daylight.”

On the International Day of Reflection on the 1994 #Genocide against the #Tutsi in #Rwanda, we remember that past because “Genocide involves all of humanity and that is why the transmission of its history is a collective responsibility.”. https://t.co/jBnk0iOuYb #Kwibuka pic.twitter.com/45R9wCplTy UNESCO 🏛️ #Education #Sciences #Culture 🇺🇳😷 UNESCO

‘Choose humanity’

The UN chief recalled that although no one who followed world affairs or watched the news, could deny “the sickening violence” taking place, too few spoke out and even fewer tried to intervene.

“Much more could have – and should have – been done. A generation after the events, the stain of shame endures ,” he underscored.

Mr. Guterres reminded everyone that “we always have a choice” and urged them “to choose humanity over hatred; compassion over cruelty; courage over complacency; and reconciliation over rage.”

Stepping up, taking action

The Secretary-General then drew attention to the principle of Responsibility to Protect ; his Call to Action , which puts human rights at the heart of the Organization; through the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide , saying, “ I have placed the agenda of prevention at the centre of our work ”.

He also pointed to the whole basis of international criminal justice, which illustrates that “perpetrators can no longer assume impunity”.

“The remarkable work of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda – the first court in history to convict an individual of genocide – was instrumental in this effort,” he said, “it has demonstrated how justice is indispensable for sustainable peace.”

Testament of healing

“ Rwanda today stands as a powerful testament of the human spirit’s ability to heal even the deepest wounds and emerge from the darkest depths to rebuild a stronger society ”, he added.

He pointed out that after having suffered “unspeakable gender-based violence”, women in Rwanda now, hold 60 percent of parliamentary seats.

And Rwanda is the fourth largest UN peacekeeping contributor, which Mr. Guterres said was helping to spare others, “the pain they themselves have known.”

Future of dignity

The genocide has raised fundamental questions about the role of the Security Council , the effectiveness of peacekeeping, the need to end impunity for international crimes, the importance of addressing roots of violence, and the fragility of civility. 

The UN chief described Ukraine in flames; old and new conflicts festering in the Middle East, Africa and beyond – while the Security Council was agreeing “mostly to disagree”.

Wars are raging, “inequalities widening, and poverty growing, and all are breeding grounds of resentment, anxiety, and anger.”

“Meanwhile, we see hate speech – including dehumanizing disinformation, racist tropes, and genocide denial and distortion – proliferating both on and offline,” the UN chief continued, warning of “the dangers of intolerance, irrationality, and bigotry in every society”.

While looking back “with remorse,” the Secretary-General urged everyone to look ahead “with resolve” and commit to “be ever vigilant” and never forget.

“ Let us pay meaningful tribute to the Rwandans who perished by building a future of dignity, tolerance, and human rights for all ,” he concluded.

Rising from the ashes

UN General Assembly President Abdulla Shahid criticized “hate speech and propaganda” for turning friends and neighbours into enemies.

During a candle-lighting ceremony, he urged the participants to “stand against racism, hate speech, xenophobia, and all forms of discrimination” and to let the light “burn brighter than the darkness of hate and violence”.

“Today, Rwanda has rebuilt from the ashes of horrific tragedy and destruction , evidenced by its economic, social and political developments,” he said.

“It laid the foundation for these achievements by having embarked on a better path; one of forgiveness and reconciliation, leaving behind past resentments and acknowledging the common humanity of all”.

Mr. Shahid honoured the survivors who “mustered the strength and courage to defy the odds,” saying that their bravery and resilience stand as “a beacon of hope for the people of Rwanda, and many more across the world”.

Bearing witness

Rwandan-born Providence Umugwaneza, was 11 years old when the genocide began. She was the fifth child in a family of eight with parents, grandparents, uncles and cousins “a constant presence” in her life.

“We were a happy family until we weren’t. During the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, my family was mercilessly killed by the Interahamwe,” the notorious Hutu paramilitary organization, she said in her recorded testimony.

Ms. Umugwaneza recounted how as a child, she didn’t understand the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi until one day her best friend labelled her a Tutsi, because she was “tall and skinny and have a long nose.”

“That’s when I realized that slight physical variations made me different in the eyes of my Hutu classmates and teachers…[and] put me at risk”.

Threats turn violent

When she was old enough to read the lists posted outside each classroom stating students’ names, religions, and ethnicities, mild threats turned to violence.

The kids began taunting Ms. Umugwaneza that as a minority, it would not be hard to exterminate her “when the time comes.”

“I would not be here today if I had not travelled to my aunt’s house during Easter,” she said, explaining that she left to help care for her new-born cousin.

Only memories live –  Genocide survivor

When it was time to go back home, news broke that the plane carrying the President was shot down, killing everybody on board.

“Within the next couple of hours, things changed quickly and for good,” the survivor continued.

“None of the kids, my uncles, and aunties escaped the killing that had been prepared for so long. In my extended family, no one survived. They were all completely wiped out. Only memories live”.

Click here to watch the ceremony in its entirety.

Welcome to the United Nations

I was tested to the limit — Rwanda genocide survivor

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Telling my personal story to others helped me in my healing journey  Consolee Nishimwe, 32, survived the 1994 genocide in Rwanda as a teenager. Currently living in New York, she shares her experience, as a global civil society activist and advocate for other genocide survivors and gender equality, with Sara Canals for Africa Renewal . She is the author of the book ‘ Tested to the Limit’ in which she narrates her personal story.

How was life in Rwanda before the genocide?

Life in Rwanda before the genocide was beautiful. I was fortunate to have good parents and a great family. I had a happy childhood despite all the things that the country was enduring at that time and the discrimination against us as Tutsis.

When did life start to change?

Things started to change way before 1994, even before I was born. Tutsis had always been discriminated against and most of them went into exile while those who remained in the country were sometimes denied certain services. I started to experience this discrimination when I joined school as a young girl. However, the situation got worse when we started hearing local radio stations calling Tutsis “cockroaches” and “snakes,” explaining how they were going to kill us.  And then the genocide happened.

How did you get through this difficult time at home?

My parents tried to protect us from all the rumours that were going around, yet I could see the fear in their faces. At that time, I was not paying much attention to their reactions. After the genocide that’s when I thought: “Wow, they were really scared, they were fearful of what was going to happen.” As a child, I never thought there would be genocide. I kept saying to myself, “I will go back to school despite all that is being said.” I never expected what happened, especially because my neighbours and friends were Hutus; we were going to school together and visited each other’s homes.

And then, the genocide happened…

Exactly, and it really affected me. Every survivor will tell you how horrible it was. The announcements over the radio were becoming increasingly alarming; it was really scary to hear how Tutsis were being killed in some areas of Rwanda. We were told we would be killed. It became risky staying at home as people were being killed in their own homes and in the streets. So my family and I, as many other Tutsi families, were forced to run away from home and hide. I still remember how scared my parents were, but as children, my siblings and I thought the mayhem would stop soon but that was not the case. We spent three months hiding in many different places and during this period many of my family members were murdered — including my father, my three brothers, my grandparents, my uncles, and many friends. My father was the first person to be killed, followed by my brothers. So my mother, my sisters and I kept hiding without knowing whether we were going to survive or not. I also remember hearing the people who took my father talking about how happy they were to have killed him. It was one of the worst times in my life. I wished they had killed me too. 

What was it like during those three months?

We survived but we were crashed emotionally and psychologically, especially my mother. We didn’t want to leave; we just hoped we could die too. So we just kept praying and hiding, without knowing whether we would survive or not. The killers were also raping and torturing women. During the time we were hiding, I was among the many girls who were raped and, unfortunately, I contracted HIV as a result.  It was very hard for me. I can’t find words to describe how I felt. I never thought I would be a normal teenager again.

Yet you have overcome all that. Can you describe your journey?

I was deeply wounded. I still have nightmares. Yet, the voice of God kept telling me never to give up. Having my sisters and my mother around, someone I could speak to, helped a lot. Being able to tell my personal story to others helped me in my healing journey. People are still going through tragedies around the world. Terrorist groups are doing horrible things to people. This is why we need to speak up and be a voice for these people.

How do you see yourself as a global civil society actor?

I want to be a voice for the genocide survivors, especially women, who are still not able to share their own stories. When they hear me telling my story, they feel that there is someone out there who has gone through similar trauma. It is also a way of honoring those who lost their lives during the genocide. We do not want them to be forgotten. My first experience telling my story, however, was not easy. I did not have words to describe what happened to me and my family.

Telling my story in many other places where Boko Haram, ISIS and other terrorist groups are doing horrible things, I feel obligated, like other advocates and social activists, to contribute to help raise our voices to stop these horrible deeds. Every time I think that someone like me, a young girl, is being tortured and raped, or people are being killed, I am convinced that my voice, in my capacity as a survivor, must be used to help prevent such things. Hopefully, our world would be a better place.

As an activist, what do you advocate for?

I am a gender activist, focusing on women survivors around the world where there is conflict, not just in Africa.

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From the Horror to the Envy of Africa: Rwanda’s Leader Holds Tight Grip

Thirty years after a devastating genocide, Rwanda has made impressive gains. But ethnic divisions persist under an iron-fisted president who has ruled for just as long.

President Paul Kagame of Rwanda in 2021. The architect of the country’s stunning transformation, he achieved it with harsh methods that would normally attract international condemnation. Credit... Simon Wohlfahrt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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By Declan Walsh

• Published April 6, 2024 Updated April 7, 2024

Blood coursed through the streets of Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, in April 1994 as machete-wielding militiamen began a campaign of genocide that killed as many as 800,000 people, one of the great horrors of the late 20th century.

Thirty years later, Kigali is the envy of Africa. Smooth streets curl past gleaming towers that hold banks, luxury hotels and tech startups. There is a Volkswagen car plant and an mRNA vaccine facility . A 10,000-seat arena hosts Africa’s biggest basketball league and concerts by stars like Kendrick Lamar, the American rapper, who performed there in December.

Tourists fly in to visit Rwanda’s famed gorillas. Government officials from other African countries arrive for lessons in good governance. The electricity is reliable. Traffic cops do not solicit bribes. Violence is rare.

The architect of this stunning transformation, President Paul Kagame, achieved it with harsh methods that would normally attract international condemnation. Opponents are jailed, free speech is curtailed and critics often die in murky circumstances, even those living in the West. Mr. Kagame’s soldiers have been accused of massacre and plunder in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo.

For decades, Western leaders have looked past Mr. Kagame’s abuses. Some have expressed guilt for their failure to halt the genocide, when Hutu extremists massacred people mostly from Mr. Kagame’s Tutsi ethnic group. Rwanda’s tragic history makes it an “ immensely special case ,” Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, once said.

Mr. Kagame will commemorate the 30th anniversary of the genocide on Sunday, when he is expected to lay wreaths at mass graves, light a flame of remembrance and deliver a solemn speech that may well reinforce his message of exceptionalism. “Never again,” he often says.

But the anniversary is also a sharp reminder that Mr. Kagame, 66, has been in power for just as long. He won the last presidential election with 99 percent of votes. The outcome of the next one, scheduled for July, is in little doubt. Under Rwanda’s Constitution, he could lead for another decade.

The milepost has given new ammunition to critics who say that Mr. Kagame’s repressive tactics, previously seen as necessary — even by critics — to stabilize Rwanda after the genocide, increasingly appear to be a way for him to entrench his iron rule.

Questions are also growing about where he is leading his country. Although he claims to have effectively banished ethnicity from Rwanda, critics — including diplomats, former government officials and many other Rwandans — say he presides over a system that is shaped by unspoken ethnic cleavages that make the prospect of genuine reconciliation seem as distant as ever.

A spokeswoman for Rwanda’s government did not respond to questions for this article. The authorities declined accreditation to me to enter the country. A second Times reporter has been allowed in.

Ethnic Tutsis dominate the top echelons of Mr. Kagame’s government, while the Hutus who make up 85 percent of the population remain excluded from true power, critics say. It is a sign that ethnic division, despite surface appearances, is still very much a factor in the way Rwanda is governed.

“The Kagame regime is creating the very conditions that cause political violence in our country,” Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, his most prominent political opponent, said by phone from Kigali. “Lack of democracy, absence of rule of law, social and political exclusion — it’s the same problems we had before.”

Ms. Ingabire, a Hutu, returned to Rwanda from exile in 2010 to run against Mr. Kagame for president. She was arrested, barred from taking part in the election and later imprisoned on charges of conspiracy and terrorism. Released in 2018, when Mr. Kagame pardoned her, Ms. Ingabire cannot travel abroad and is barred from standing in the election in July.

“I agree with those who say Rwanda needed a strongman ruler after the genocide, to bring order in our country, ” she said. “But today, after 30 years, we need strong institutions more than we need strong men.”

Mr. Kagame burst into power in July 1994, sweeping into Kigali at the head of a Tutsi-dominated rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which ousted the Hutu extremists who orchestrated the genocide. Randy Strash, a worker with the aid agency World Vision, arrived a few weeks later to find a “ghost town.”

“No gas stations, no stores, no communications,” he recalled. “Abandoned vehicles by the side of the road, riddled with bullets. At night, the sound of gunshots and hand grenades. It was something else.”

Mr. Strash set up his tent across the street from a camp where Mr. Kagame was quartered. Hutu fighters attacked the camp several times, trying to kill Mr. Kagame, Mr. Strash said. But it was not until a decade later, at an event at the University of Washington, that he met the Rwandan leader in person.

“Very polite and reasonable in his responses,” Mr. Strash recalled. “Clear, thoughtful and thought-provoking.”

Historical documents released by Human Rights Watch this past week show how much U.S. leaders knew about the slaughter as it unfolded. Writing to President Bill Clinton on May 16, 1994, the researcher Alison Des Forges urged him “to protect these defenseless civilians from murderous militia.”

Since coming to power, Mr. Kagame has had a reputation for spending aid wisely and promoting forward-looking economic policies. Although former aides have accused him of manipulating official statistics to exaggerate progress, Rwanda’s trajectory is impressive: Average life expectancy rose to 66 years from 40 years between 1994 and 2021, the United Nations says.

One of Mr. Kagame’s first acts was to publicly erase the dangerous divisions that had fueled the genocide. He banned the terms Hutu and Tutsi from identity cards and effectively criminalized public discussion of ethnicity . “We are all Rwandan” became the national motto.

But in reality, ethnicity continued to suffuse nearly every aspect of life, reinforced by Mr. Kagame’s policies. “Everyone knows who is who,” said Joseph Sebarenzi, a Tutsi who served as the president of Rwanda’s Parliament until 2000, when he fled into exile.

A survey published last year by Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian professor and outspoken Kagame critic, found that 82 percent of 199 top government positions were held by ethnic Tutsi — and nearly 100 percent in Mr. Kagame’s office. American diplomats reached a similar conclusion in 2008, after conducting their own survey of Rwanda’s power structure.

Mr. Kagame “must begin to share authority with Hutus to a much greater degree” if his country were to surmount the divides of the genocide, the U.S. Embassy wrote in a cable that was later published by WikiLeaks.

Critics accuse Mr. Kagame of using the memory of the events of 1994 to suppress the Hutu majority.

Official commemorations mention “the genocide of the Tutsi” but play down or ignore the tens of thousands of moderate Hutus who were also killed, often trying to save their Tutsi neighbors.

A perception of selective justice rubs salt into those wounds. Mr. Kagame’s troops killed 25,000 to 45,000 people, mostly Hutu civilians, from April to August 1994, according to disputed U.N. findings . Yet fewer than 40 of his officers have been tried for those crimes, according to Human Rights Watch.

The Hutu killings are incomparable in scale or nature to the genocide. But Mr. Kagame’s lopsided approach to dealing with those events is hampering Rwandans’ ability to reconcile and move on, critics say.

“Anyone not familiar with Rwanda might think that everything is fine,” Mr. Sebarenzi said. “People work together, they go to church together, they do business together. That is good. But under the carpet, those ethnic divisions are still there.”

Although Mr. Kagame has appointed Hutus to senior positions in government since 1994, including prime minister and defense minister, those appointees have little real power, said Omar Khalfan, a former official with Rwanda’s national intelligence service who fled into exile in the United States in 2015.

Tutsi loyalists are planted in the offices of senior Hutus to keep an eye on them, said Mr. Khalfan, a Tutsi. “The regime doesn’t want to speak about ethnicity because it raises the issue of power-sharing,” he said. “And they don’t want that.”

In the West, Mr. Kagame is a firm favorite at gatherings of the global elite such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in January. But at home, those who publicly challenge him risk arrest, torture or death.

A decade ago, Kizito Mihigo, a charismatic gospel singer, was among Rwanda’s most popular artists. A Tutsi who lost his parents in the genocide, Mr. Mihigo often sang at genocide commemorations and was said to be close to Mr. Kagame’s wife, Jeannette.

But on the 20th anniversary, Mr. Mihigo released a song that in coded lyrics called on Rwandans to show empathy for both Tutsi and Hutu victims — effectively, a call for greater reconciliation.

Mr. Kagame was furious. A presidential aide said he “didn’t like my song, and that I should ask him for forgiveness,” Mr. Mihigo recalled in 2016 . If the singer refused to comply, he added, “they said I’d be dead.”

Mr. Mihigo apologized but was convicted on treason charges and imprisoned. Released four years later, he found he was blacklisted as a singer. In 2020, he was arrested again as he tried to slip across the border to Burundi and, four days later, found dead in a police station.

The government said Mr. Mihigo had taken his life, but few believed it. “He was a very strong Christian who believed in God,” said Ms. Ingabire, the opposition politician, who came to know Mr. Mihigo in prison. “I can’t believe this is true.”

Mr. Kagame’s reach extends across the globe. Rights groups have documented dozens of cases of Rwandan exiles being intimidated, attacked or assassinated by presumed agents of the state in at least a dozen countries, including Canada , Australia and South Africa .

Mr. Khalfan, the former intelligence officer, said he was approached at home in Ohio in 2019 by a man he identified as an undercover Rwandan agent. The man tried to lure him to Dubai — a similar ruse to the one that caused Paul Rusesabagina , a Hutu hotelier whose story featured in the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” to be tricked into returning to the country in 2020.

Mr. Rusesabagina was released from prison last year , after years of U.S. pressure. The episode only underscored how little real resistance Mr. Kagame faces at home. But a more immediate worry lies across the border , in eastern Congo.

There, the United States and the United Nations have publicly accused Rwanda of sending troops and missiles in support of M23, a notorious rebel group that swept across the territory in recent months, causing widespread displacement and suffering. The M23 has long been seen as a Rwandan proxy force in Congo, where Mr. Kagame’s troops have been accused of plundering rare minerals and massacring civilians. Rwanda denies the charges.

The crisis has cooled Mr. Kagame’s relations with the United States, his largest foreign donor, American officials say. Senior Biden administration officials traveled to Rwanda , Congo and, more discreetly, Tanzania in recent months in an effort to prevent the crisis from spiraling into a regional war. In August, the United States imposed sanctions on a senior Rwandan military commander for his role in backing the M23 .

U.S. officials described tense, sometimes confrontational meetings between Mr. Kagame and senior American officials, including the U.S.A.I.D. administrator, Samantha Power, over Rwanda’s role in eastern Congo.

Mr. Kagame has often denied that Rwandan troops are in Congo, but he appeared to admit the opposite tacitly in a recent interview with Jeune Afrique magazine .

In justifying their presence, he fell back on familiar logic: that he was acting to prevent a second genocide, this time against the ethnic Tutsi population in eastern Congo.

Arafat Mugabo contributed reporting.

An earlier version of this article misstated the circumstances surrounding Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza’s presidential bid and her arrest. She was arrested before the election, not after. She did not lose the election; she was barred from taking part in it because of the arrest.

How we handle corrections

Declan Walsh covers Africa for The Times from a base in Nairobi, Kenya. He previously reported from Cairo and Islamabad, Pakistan. More about Declan Walsh

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The Rwandan Genocide was a tragic event that happened in April 1994 to July 1994. The genocide took place in the Rwandan Civil War, a conflict beginning in 1990 between the Hutu and the Tutsis people. The genocide made many problems for the world, it has many lasting effects on the world and Rwanda. The Rwandan genocide was as devastating as the Holocaust and were both left with a bad reputation. “After the genocide, Rwanda was on the brink of […]

How could Rwandan Genocide be Justified?

The Rwandan genocide occured in 1994 in Kigali, Rwanda. After the germans lost possession of Rwanda, the people of Rwanda were placed under the Belgian administration. The fight between the two ethnic groups, Hutu and Tutsi, had been brewing for years but with the death of their king and president the Hutus saw a chance to move higher up in the social status. For years, the Hutus and Tutsis were treated as two different races instead of the same. This […]

Outlook on the Cambodian Genocide

The Cambodian Genocide was a slaughter of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge who was led by Pol Pot, from 1975-1979. Pol Pot who was the Prime minister of Cambodia at the time killed Cambodians by execution, forced labor, and famine.  Pol Pot renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea. The reign was ended after 4 years when Vietnam invaded and caused the collapse of the regime. The Cambodian Genocide was the result of a social engineering project by the Khmer Rouge, attempting […]

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Hotel Rwanda (2004): a Cinematic Exploration of the Rwandan Genocide

In the realm of cinema, certain films transcend their role as mere entertainment to become powerful tools for historical reflection and social commentary. "Hotel Rwanda," directed by Terry George, is a poignant exemplar of this transformative potential. Released in 2004, the film plunges viewers into the heart of one of the darkest chapters in human history – the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Through the lens of this gripping narrative, George skillfully unravels the complexities of the genocide, shedding light on […]

The Armenian Genocide

The start of the Armenian genocide occurred in the year 1913 and extended all the way through 1916 which involved the Turks and Armenian people taking place in the Ottoman Empire. Throughout history, attempts to gain control over land has been a major cause of destruction and mass targeting of groups of people in the efforts to retain powerful empires and kingdoms throughout history. The loss of the Ottoman Empire's land to the west brought the leaders of the Turkish […]

Phenomenon of Genocide

Between 1975 and 1979, during the Vietnam War, the United States bombarded a great deal of the nation of Cambodia and manipulated Cambodian politics to support the increase of Lon Nol as the leader of Cambodia. A Communist group known as Khmer Rouge used this as an opportunity to recruit followers as an excuse for the brutal policies, they exercised once in power. The Khmer Rouge took control of the Cambodian government in 1975, with the objective of transforming the […]

Horror of Genocide

Throughout history, man has always been at battle with one another, even today. When remembering the different historical events that occurred back then, the main things that come to the mind are war and hatred. Over the years different groups of people and government have had the trait of hatred and have used it to go through with eliminating their "enemies" with war. War has a certain standard, this standard allows people to fight when legitimate conflicts arise and can't […]

American Genocide Issues

"By 1923, a 3,000-year-old civilization virtually ceased to exist," (Cohan). This civilization is Armenia, once a nation under the rule of the formidable Ottoman Empire, a powerful Islamic dynasty that controlled extensive territories throughout Southeast Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa. As citizens of the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian people were challenged for their firm Christian identity by its Turkish rulers through discriminatory laws and taxes. With the Empire facing territorial decline and a severe collapse of power amidst Armenian […]

Problem of Genocide in America

In America there has been Genocide. Even abroad there has been genocide. Genocide is classified as the "deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group". Genocide is intentional killing of people based on their race, gender, and many other entities. Many classify the biggest genocide in history was the killing of Germans during the Holocaust. Also, the intentional killing of Black Americans, during the slave trade and slavery. Even today with the intentional oppression of Black Americans […]

US Backed a Genocide

This research paper focuses on The United States lack of political action against human rights violations against the Argentina citizens by the military dictatorship and General Jorge Rafael Videla. The fact the United States knew about the human right violations, had a team conduct investigation in to the matters and supported the military dictatorships. Creates a moral and ethical question here as to how the US justified their support of the military dictatorship and the Foreign Policy that played into […]

The Genocide of the Pontic Greeks

The Pontic Greeks were set in Ottoman Empire in the midst of the Armenian Genocide. It was the Spring of 1914. The Turks began ordering Greeks from Eastern Thrace as well as Western Anatolia to boycott every business run by a Greek. In the midst of this, hundreds of thousands Greek inhabitants from those regions were deported. Every Ottoman Greek man with an age between 21 and 45 were sent to concentration camps. These men endured pain-staking labor lacking any […]

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80 Rwandan Genocide Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best rwandan genocide topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 interesting topics to write about rwandan genocide, 🔎 good research topics about rwandan genocide.

• ❓ Rwandan Genocide Essay Questions
• Genocide in the “Ghost of Rwanda” Documentary In the colonial process, the Hutus were discriminated by the colonial power, which was Belgium with the help of the Tutsi.
• The History of the Genocide in the Rwandan The Rwandan civil war led to the signing of the Arusha Accord that compelled the Rwandan government, which Hutu dominated, to form a government of national unity by incorporating marginalized Tutsi and the Hutu who […] We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• Genocide: Darfur and Rwanda Cases When examining the case of Darfur, it can be noted that three specific factors prevented “true justice” from being administered, these encompass: the abstained votes from the U.S.and China in voting for a resolution for […]
• Rwandan Conflict as a Deep-Rooted and Identity-Based Conflict Many causes are examined as well as circumstances that led to the development of conflict or rather genocide that took place in 1994 which led to loss of hundred of thousands of lives, displacement of […]
• Hotel Rwanda’: The 1994 Rwandan Genocide’s History Besides, the assassination of the 1994 president, who belonged to ethnic Tutsi, was one of the main causes; the Hutus accused the Tutsis of having been responsible for the president’s assassination.
• Rwanda Genocide: “Shake Hands with the Devil” by Dallaire Romeo This paper will examine the issue in highlighting the theme that the main purpose of the book was to let the world know of its callousness and lack of precaution while the horrible and immoral […]
• The Rwandan Conflict and Social Network Approaches The structures and/or rules that the parties involved use to assemble and make interpretations of the conflicts provide a way in which people use the messages to achieve their goals concerning the issue of conflicts.
• Comparison of Genocide in Rwanda and Nazi Germany The proponents of the emancipation movement called the Rwandan Patriotic Front returned to the country in the fall 1990 to live within the population of Tutsi.
• Genocide Factors in Rwanda and Cambodia By the start of the last decade of the 20th Century, animosity between the Hutus and the Tutsis had escalated with the former accusing the latter of propagating socioeconomic and political inequalities within the country.
• Rwanda Genocide: Process and Outcomes It will describe the Tutsi-favored political system and land distribution system that contributed to the occurrence of the Genocide. The Europeans were of the opinion that the Tutsi did not originate from the region.
• Ethnic Conflicts and Misrepresentation of Rwandan Hutus Many people see the core of the conflict in the period of European colonization of Africa and especially the first part of the 20th century, when European nationalism spread all over the world.
• Stories of Rwanda’s Recovery From Genocide Today, the killers and the victims of the genocide live side by side, and the government focuses on finding the effective measures and legacies to overcome the consequences of the genocide and to state the […]
• The Rwandan Genocide: Hutus and Tutsi Ethnic Hatred People have always believed that the ethnic hatred between the Hutus and the Tutsi was the core cause of the genocide.
• In-class Reaction Paper: Rwandan Genocide The book offers a detailed description of the events that took place in the 1994 Rwandan genocide as told by the survivors of the massacre.
• Genocide in Rwanda: Insiders and Outsiders The paper will look into the Rwandese pre genocide history, factors that led to the genocide, the execution of the genocide and impacts of the genocide.
• The Main Factors That Influenced the Rwandan Genocide
• Causes and Events of the Rwandan Genocide and African Holocaust
• Hutu Tutsi Hutu Rwandan Genocide
• The Rwandan Genocide Was a One Hundred Day Slaughter
• Rwandan Genocide and the Lack of International Intervention
• Global Rwandan Genocide and Approximate
• Reaction of World on the Rwandan Genocide
• The Nature of Ethnic Civil Wars: Case Study of Rwandan Genocide
• Evidence From the 1994 Rwandan Genocide
• The Nuremberg Trials About Rwandan Genocide
• Lessons Learnt From the Rwandan Genocide
• Comparing Genocide, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Bosnian Genocide
• The Conflict With Rwandan Genocide Survivors
• Historical Representation of the Rwandan Genocide in “Murambi: The Book of Bones”
• Why Canadians Are Blame for the Rwandan Genocide
• Similarities and Differences Between the Rwandan Genocide and the Holocaust
• Propaganda and Conflict: Evidence From the Rwandan Genocide
• The Rwandan Genocide and Ethnic Conflict
• European Intervention in the Rwandan Genocide
• The Rwandan Genocide and Its Effects on Rwanda’s Society
• Crime Against Humanity and Peace – Rwandan Genocide
• The Causes and Consequences of the Rwandan Genocide
• Belgian and French Influence on the Rwandan Genocide
• Surviving the Genocide: The Impact of the Rwandan Genocide on Child Mortality
• Legal and Non-legal Responses to the Rwandan Genocide
• Propaganda for Mass Kill: Like the Rwandan Genocide
• The Political Causes of the Rwandan Genocide
• The Role of Responsibility in the Rwandan Genocide
• Rwandan Genocide Speech From the Perspective of the Victim
• State Capacity and Violence: Evidence From the Rwandan Genocide
• Intervention in the Rwandan Genocide
• Human Rights and Intervention in the Rwandan Genocide
• History of Ethnic Violence and the Rwandan Genocide
• Blaming Western Nations for Rwandan Genocide
• What Was the Cause of the Rwandan Genocide
• The United Nations and International Community Fail to Prevent the Rwandan Genocide
• Main Problems and Consequences of the Rwandan Genocide
• Local Economic Conditions and Participation in the Rwandan Genocide

❓Rwandan Genocide Essay Questions

• What Is the Rwandan Genocide?
• Why Did the US Not Help Rwanda?
• How Did Rwandan Genocide Start?
• Why Did No One Intervene in the Rwandan Genocide?
• How Did the United Nations Respond to the Rwandan Genocide?
• What Music Was Dedicated to the Rwandan Genocide?
• What Are the Causes of Rwandan Genocide?
• How Did Rwandan Recover From the Rwandan Genocide?
• Why Did the United States Not Want to Get Involved in Rwandan Genocide?
• What Brought the Rwandan Genocide to an End?
• How Did the Rwandan Genocide Start?
• How Did the World Help Rwanda During the Rwandan Genocide?
• How Long Did the Genocide in Rwanda Last?
• How Many People Died During the Rwandan Genocide?
• Who Was Convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal After the Rwandan Genocide?
• What Films Are Dedicated to the Rwandan Genocide?
• What Rights Were Violated in the Rwandan Genocide?
• How Many People Fled the Country During the Rwandan Genocide?
• What Was the Effect of the Rwandan Genocide?
• How Did the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe React to the Rwandan Genocide?
• Who Is to Blame for the Rwandan Genocide?
• How Was the Rwandan Genocide Carried Out?
• Why Was Rwandan Genocide So Vicious?
• What Are the Consequences of Rwandan Genocide?
• How Did the Rwandan Genocide Affect the Economy?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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A week of mourning in Rwanda to commemorate 30 years of 1994 genocide

President Paul Kagame leads rites in Kigali as the African nation marks one of the bloodiest massacres of the 20th century.

Rwandans are marking 30 years since a genocide orchestrated by armed Hutu tore apart their country, as neighbours turned on each other in one of the bloodiest massacres of the 20th century.

President Paul Kagame led the commemoration on Sunday by placing wreaths on the mass graves in the capital, Kigali, flanked by foreign dignitaries, including the leaders of South Africa and Ethiopia as well as former US President Bill Clinton, who had called the genocide the biggest failure of his administration.

Keep reading

What caused the rwandan genocide 30 years ago, rwandan doctor given 24-year jail sentence in france over 1994 genocide, rwanda genocide suspect kabuga should not face trial, un judges say, photos: victims of rwandan genocide still being found 30 years on.

The killing spree, which began on April 7, 1994 , lasted 100 days before the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebel militia took Kigali in July of the year, and saw some 800,000 people dead, largely Tutsis but also moderate Hutus.

The assassination of Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana on the night of April 6, when his plane was shot down over Kigali, triggered the rampage by armed Hutu men and the “Interahamwe” militia.

Their victims were shot, beaten or hacked to death in killings fuelled by vicious anti-Tutsi propaganda broadcast on TV and radio. At least 250,000 women were raped, according to the United Nations figures.

The tiny nation has since found its footing under the rule of Kagame, who led the RPF, but the scars of the violence remain, leaving a trail of destruction across Africa’s Great Lakes region.

Al Jazeera’s Stefanie Dekker, reporting from Kigali, said 30 years after the mass killings, the pain is still evident among many Rwandans.

“But they also feel that it is every Rwandan’s responsibility to commemorate the genocide, to remember what happened and to ensure that it will never happen again,” she said.

The international community’s failure to intervene has been a cause of lingering shame, with French President Emmanuel Macron expected to release a message on Sunday saying that France and its Western and African allies “could have stopped” the bloodshed but lacked the will to do so.

Coming to a standstill

Sunday’s events mark the start of a week of national mourning, with Rwanda effectively coming to a standstill and national flags flown at half-mast.

In keeping with tradition, Kagame also lighted a remembrance flame at the Kigali Genocide Memorial , where more than 250,000 victims are believed to be buried. He is also expected to deliver a speech later in the day. He was accompanied by the first lady, Jeannette Kagame.

Music will not be allowed in public places or on the radio, while sports events and movies are banned from TV broadcasts unless connected to what has been dubbed “Kwibuka (Remembrance) 30” .

The UN and the African Union will also hold remembrance ceremonies.

Karel Kovanda, a former Czech diplomat who was the first UN ambassador to publicly call the events of 1994 a genocide, nearly a month after the killings began, said the massacres should never be forgotten.

“The page cannot be turned,” he told the AFP news agency in an interview in Kigali, urging efforts to ensure that “the genocide [doesn’t] slip into oblivion”.

Each year, new mass graves are still being uncovered around the country.

According to Rwanda, hundreds of genocide suspects remain at large , including in neighbouring nations such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda.

Only 28 of them have been extradited to Rwanda from around the world.

France, one of the top destinations for Rwandans fleeing justice at home, has tried and convicted half a dozen people over their involvement in the killings.

In 2002, Rwanda set up community tribunals where victims heard “confessions” from those who had persecuted them, although rights watchdogs said the system also resulted in miscarriages of justice.

Today, Rwandan ID cards do not mention whether a person is Hutu or Tutsi.

In advance of the 30th anniversary, there were renewed calls from rights watchdogs for remaining genocide suspects to be held to account.

“I urge states everywhere to redouble their efforts to bring all surviving suspected perpetrators to justice – including through universal jurisdiction – and to combat hate speech and incitement to commit genocide,” UN human rights chief Volker Turk said on Friday.

In this Rwandan village, survivors and perpetrators of the genocide live side by side

NYAMATA, Rwanda — Rachel Mukantabana was a teenager when the devastating genocide in Rwanda unfolded.

"I was 15 years old and I knew exactly what was happening," she told NPR. "Even a five-year-old knew what was about to happen."

Two days into the 100-day genocide, Mukantabana and her family fled their homes. They first went to a church, and then a school, before ultimately hiding in a large swamp — hoping that no one would be able to reach them in the water.

This week, Rwanda marks the 30th anniversary of the genocide in which nearly one million people, most of them ethnic Tutsis, were killed.

As many as a quarter million Rwandan civilians participated in the killings. Across the country, neighbors brutally attacked their neighbors with machetes, sticks and clubs.

The violence was intimate and vicious.

In those first days in the swamp in 1994, Mukantabana and her family were safe. But near the end of April, she said, hundreds of soldiers and Interahamwe — Hutu militia members — came.

"They surrounded the whole swamp and killed people until the evening," she said.

They returned the next day, in even greater numbers, to kill again. Mukantabana's younger sister was killed with a spear, and Mukantabana was captured.

She begged for her life, trying to convince the soldiers that her father was a Hutu man.

"They were checking my legs and said, 'Your legs look like a Tutsis','" she said.

The soldiers beat her legs with a hammer, but she was able to get away and hide in the swamp again. She hid there for weeks with others, she said, as a brutal pattern played out.

"The way we knew that the killing had stopped was, they'd shoot one bullet in the air," she said. "That meant the killing was over for the day. They'll be back tomorrow."

In May, a group of rebel soldiers led them out of the swamp.

Mukantabana said that her mother, four siblings and more than 50 members of her extended family were killed during the genocide.

Today, Mukantabana lives in a "reconciliation village," where people who survived the genocide live side by side with the very perpetrators who killed.

Measuring reconciliation

Forgiveness and reconciliation are personal. But in Rwanda today, they are also orchestrated by the government.

The Rwandan government, led by President Paul Kagame, has outlawed speech that draws distinctions between ethnic groups. National ID cards no longer identify ethnic groups. Laws ban so-called genocidal ideology.

The government has an official " reconciliation barometer ," which looks at a variety of factors to determine how people are living together. In 2020 — the last year for which data is available — the country deemed reconciliation in Rwanda to be at 94.7%.

"Rwandans generally revere the government. So I definitely think that the state is highly involved and in some ways it's hard to disentangle anything from such a powerful government," said Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira, an associate sociology professor at Ohio State University, whose research focuses on why genocide happens and how countries rebuild.

She has conducted extensive interviews with genocide survivors and perpetrators.

"I do think that reconciliation is happening in Rwanda, but most of the folks that I spoke with wouldn't say it's been achieved, but rather it's a messy process," she said.

Nyseth Nzitatira said that what happened in Rwanda could be instructive for other countries.

"What many countries could learn from Rwanda is the value of explicitly addressing your past, of talking about what happened, of coming to terms with what happened, of commemorating what happened," she said. "And this is something that Rwanda has done incredibly well."

At the reconciliation village, we tell Mukantabana that we plan to meet with genocide perpetrators too, including a man who lives a short drive from her. And we ask her what kind of questions she thinks we should ask him.

"What I would ask them is, when they were killing people, inside themselves, did they feel human or [like] animals?"

We put this question to Didas Kayinamura when we met him at his home a short time later.

Speaking through an interpreter, he said that he was coerced by a killing group, and that they threatened his life. They pushed him, he said, to kill a man.

"They gave me a stick, a very strong stick, and they said, you have to kill him with this stick," he said.

Kayinamura said that he tried to kill the man twice, but ultimately, someone else delivered the killing blow.

He said that despite pressure, he never participated in the violence again.

"One guy. That's it. I stopped. I killed once," he said.

Two identities

First person narratives about genocide are complex. Experts say there can be a tendency among perpetrators to minimize their role — sometimes in the hope of a shorter prison sentence, sometimes because the trauma of the genocide alters a perpetrator's memory.

"I'm not saying I'm not a killer. I'm not saying I didn't participate in a genocide," Kayinamura said. "I committed genocide. Why? Because when this group of people went to kill this gentleman, I went with them."

Perpetrators like Kayinamura were tried in community-based courts that sprung up quickly. The accused were judged by their neighbors. The proceedings relied on eyewitness narratives of fast-moving, violent incidents.

These Gacaca courts tried criminals, but also promoted interpersonal forgiveness and reconciliation.

"The first thing they said in Gacaca court was to say if someone ... asks for forgiveness ... he will get out of prison," Kayinamura said. He ended up serving more than six years in prison.

"My identity is genocidaire," he said, evoking a word for someone who participated in a genocide.

Mukantabana has a different identity: mother. She is raising five children and sees a clear future for herself.

"For me, the fact that I have children gives me the confidence to rebuild my life," she said. "My children have allowed me to start over."

Mukantabana's new life includes learning how to live in a community with people who 30 years ago could have wanted her dead.

When asked if she feels comfortable living in the reconciliation village, she gestured just outside the door. The man walking outside, she said, is a Hutu. And she doesn't feel afraid.

"Thirty years after genocide ... things are pretty good," Mukantabana said. "People live together peacefully. There's no more Hutu, no more Tutsi — we are all Rwandan."

All Rwandan, all now living under the shadow of a brutal history that pitted neighbor against neighbor.

The people who served the longest sentences for their roles in the genocide are just returning home, and the work of learning to live side-by-side continues.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Rwanda Genocide of 1994

In your own words, describe the appropriate justice for the accused genocide suspect in the rwanda atrocity..

Rwanda’s genocide was unique in its brutality and punctilious planning, where Hutu extremists aimed at the Tutsi community. In April 1994, a plane crash killed the Rwandan and Burundian presidents in Kigali. Ethnic killings erupted in Rwanda due to the plane crash. Planned by Hutu politicians and extremist groups, the genocide killed around five hundred thousand people while destroying Tutsi in months. Hutu people and everyone who failed to cooperate and oppose the genocide were also killed (Banks & Baker, 2015). Rwandan security forces who worked with the ruling party and the Hutu civilians cooperated and hunted down people of Tutsi origin. The Rwandan genocide emerged as one of the serious ethnic violence globally.

The people who planned and organized the genocide are unknown, but the extremist group against the peace process uncovered opposition and government leaders trying to overturn their plans. Many commentators agree that the genocide did not just happen due to the president’s killing but was planned. The U.S Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) revealed that the army participated in the genocide, but it was not spontaneous (Banks & Baker, 2015). The organizers of the genocide assumed government control, and some officers under the killed president staged a military crisis and took control (Banks & Baker, 2015). Hutu were appointed to senior government positions at the village level so that they could facilitate the killing of Tutsi. The militia were highly relied on by police, army and local leaders to conduct massacres. Many strategies were put in place to ensure all the Tutsi were eliminated. The killing involved a lot of brutality, such as using machetes to chop off limbs and torture. Every society contributed to the Rwandan genocide, including the leaders, police and political parties. The media and civil society also participated in the genocide as the media incited violence. Laws were passed to establish Gacaca courts, and all cases were forwarded to Gacaca courts by 2008 (Banks & Baker, 2015). The main reason for legislation to initiate gacaca was it would be perceived as an appropriate means for handling the issue of public killing by the public.

I believe reaching justice is difficult when we consider the brutality of the genocide. The accused justice needed local courts to establish the main agenda behind such killing so that appropriate measures could be arrived at to restore the nation’s stability. The number of accused individuals was many, and imprisoning all of them was difficult. The gacaca courts needed to establish behaviour change measures while arranging reconciliation sessions between the two ethnic communities (Banks & Baker, 2015). Reconciliation would only be the appropriate solution since when the suspects were punished did not mean the end of the genocide.

Why did Rwanda eventually decide to use local “gacaca” courts instead of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to process the 135000 suspects?

In Rwanda, dispute settlement took place in public gatherings involving male elders delivering judgment on inheritance and land issues. Decisions in  Gacaca  used to be consensual, and people were compensated through payment. The Rwandan government understood that they could not handle the genocide cases as they involved a large number of people. Around mid-1998, the people in custody while awaiting trial were above one hundred and thirty-five thousand. The prison capacity was around 15000, and this made correlational facilities difficulty to hold such a large number. The Rwandan government had not yet established a justice system before the genocide occurred, and the judicial system had many problems such as under staffing lack of skills and resources (Banks & Baker, 2015). The justice system was incapacitated, and there was an urgent need for a solution to prosecute people who were already dying in prison due to poor hygiene and health. The government facilitated meetings to find solutions on how justice would be delivered, and it was decided that a formal justice system would not be appropriate, but they utilised the Gacaca (Banks & Baker, 2015) . Gacaca  was proposed and modelled in a modern manner to enable the handling of genocide crimes. Gacaca was viewed as a way of restoring stability, allowing the truth to be known, and allowing reconciliation to allow people back to their society who have been accused. Gacaca courts were viewed to allow judges of the genocide to address matters of their community members while allowing the end of the genocide.

How well did the local system work?

The local system tried to provide solutions between the warring ethnic groups by leading reconciliations to restore peace and stability. The establishment of categories of genocide perpetrators was one measure that the local system did well as it allowed easy preparation of the cases and trial process. Allowing different categories of cases to be handled differently allowed justice to be arrived at easily as perpetrators would receive balanced justice. The local system, despite their challenges, was able to deliver judgment to genocide perpetrators in a manner that aimed to restore stability within the country.

Banks, C., & Baker, J. (2015).  Comparative, international, and global justice: Perspectives from criminology and criminal justice . Sage Publications.

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Rwanda’s leader is concerned about perceived U.S. ambiguity about victims of the 1994 genocide

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Rwandan President Paul Kagame said Monday he was concerned by what he saw as a U.S. failure to characterize the 1994 massacres as a genocide against the country’s minority Tutsis.

Kagame told reporters that the issue was an “element of discussion” in talks with former U.S. President Clinton, who led the American delegation to a ceremony Sunday commemorating the 30th anniversary of the genocide in which Hutu extremists slaughtered about 800,000 people, most of them Tutsis, in a government-orchestrated campaign.

Many Rwandans criticized U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken for failing to specify that the genocide targeted the Tutsis when he wrote late Sunday: “We mourn the many thousands of Tutsis, Hutus, Twas, and others whose lives were lost during 100 days of unspeakable violence.”

Responding to a journalist’s question about Blinken’s post on the social platform X, Kagame said he believed he had reached an agreement with U.S. authorities a decade ago for them not to voice any criticism on the genocide anniversary.

“Give us that day,” he said, adding that criticism over “everything we are thought not to have at all” is unwanted on the genocide anniversary.

Rwandan authorities insist any ambiguity on who the genocide victims were is an attempt to distort history and disrespects the memory of the victims.

U.S. officials did not comment on Monday. President Biden issued a statement Sunday, saying, “We will never forget the horrors of those 100 days, the pain and loss suffered by the people of Rwanda, or the shared humanity that connects us all, which hate can never overcome.”

World & Nation

Kagame blames the world’s inaction as Rwanda commemorates the 1994 genocide with lingering scars

Rwandan President Paul Kagame has blamed the inaction of the international community for allowing the 1994 genocide to happen.

April 7, 2024

“In the 100 days that followed, more than 800,000 women, men, and children were murdered. Most were ethnic Tutsis; some were Hutus and Twa people. It was a methodical mass extermination, turning neighbor against neighbor, and decades later, its repercussions are still felt across Rwanda and around the world,” Biden wrote.

“We honor the victims who died senselessly and the survivors who courageously rebuilt their lives. And we commend all Rwandans who have contributed to reconciliation and justice efforts, striving to help their nation bind its wounds, heal its trauma, and build a foundation of peace and unity. Those efforts continue to this day.”

The question of how to memorialize the genocide stems from allegations that the Rwandan Patriotic Front — the rebel group that stopped the massacres and has ruled Rwanda unchallenged since 1994 — carried out its own revenge killings during and after the genocide.

Kagame has previously said that his forces showed restraint. He said in a speech Sunday that Rwandans are disgusted by what he described as the hypocrisy of Western nations that failed to stop the genocide.

The genocide was ignited when a plane carrying then-President Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down over Kigali on April 6, 1994. The Tutsis were blamed for downing the plane and killing the president, and became targets in massacres led by Hutu extremists that lasted over 100 days. Some moderate Hutus who tried to protect members of the Tutsi minority were also killed.

As part of weeklong commemorations, flags flew at half-staff and public places across Rwanda were told to keep entertainment quiet.

Mass graves in Rwanda reveal cracks in reconciliation efforts, 30 years after the genocide

Mass graves are still being found in Rwanda, 30 years after the genocide in which extremist Hutus killed an estimated 800,000 Tutsis in the Central African country.

Rwandan authorities also face questions over how to present commemoration activities in a way that acknowledges the efforts of some Hutus to protect their Tutsi neighbors.

“You see, those who are denying the genocide are saying, ’Ah, to commemorate? It’s a big serious barrier to unity. We have to move forward, to forget about commemoration,’” said Naphtal Ahishakiye, executive secretary of a prominent group of genocide survivors in Kigali. “Those are wrong. They have genocide ideology. They don’t want to remember what happened.”

The government has long blamed the international community for ignoring warnings about the killings, and some Western leaders have expressed regret.

French President Emmanuel Macron said last week that France and its allies could have stopped the genocide but lacked the will to do so. Macron’s declaration came three years after he acknowledged the “overwhelming responsibility” of France — Rwanda’s closest European ally in 1994 — for failing to stop Rwanda’s slide into the slaughter.

Although Kagame is a U.S. ally and has friendly relations with many Western leaders, he is under growing pressure over Rwanda’s military involvement in eastern Congo, where tensions have flared recently as the two countries’ leaders accuse one another of supporting armed groups. In February, the U.S. urged Rwanda to withdrawal its troops and missile systems from eastern Congo, for the first time describing the M23 as a Rwanda-backed rebel group.

25 years after genocide, can Rwanda heal? Six villages try

Twenty-five years ago, Tasian Nkundiye murdered his neighbor with a machete.

April 6, 2019

U.N. experts have said they had “solid evidence” that members of Rwanda’s armed forces were conducting operations there in support of M23, whose rebellion has caused the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people in Congo’s North Kivu’s province.

Kagame said Monday that the M23 are fighting for the rights of Congolese Tutsis, with at least 100,000 of them now seeking shelter in Rwanda after fleeing attacks in eastern Congo.

Rwandan authorities say they want to deter rebels, including Hutu extremists responsible for the genocide, who fled to eastern Congo.

Rwanda’s ethnic composition remains largely unchanged since 1994, with a Hutu majority. The Tutsis account for 14% and the Twa just 1% of Rwanda’s 14 million people.

Kagame’s Tutsi-dominated government has outlawed any form of organization along ethnic lines, as part of efforts to build a uniform Rwandan identity. National ID cards no longer identify citizens by ethnic group, and authorities imposed a tough penal code to prosecute those suspected of denying the genocide or the “ideology” behind it.

But some observers say the law has been used to silence critics who question the government’s policies, including how to build lasting unity and reconciliation.

Muhumuza and SSuuna write for the Associated Press.

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