Cause of the Rwanda genocide
Cause of the Rwanda genocide : The 1994 Rwanda Genocide also known as the genocide against the Tutsi and members of the Hutu ethnic majority of Rwanda, this genocide took place between April 07th 1994 and July 15th 1994 resulting into the death of over 800,000 people mostly of the Tusti minority.
The 1994 Rwanda genocide was started by the Huntu nationalists in the capital of Kigal and it spread throughout the parts of the country at a shocking speed and brutality, the ordinary citizens of Rwanda were incited by the local officials and the Hutu power government to take up arms against their neighbours
The Rwanda genocide was caused by the following factors
Rwandan Ethnic Tensions
By the early 10s, Rwanda which a small country with an overwhelmingly agricultural economy comprised of the highest population densities in Africa, about 85% of this population was Hutus and the rest were Tutsi along with a small number of the Twa – a pygmy group who were the original habitants of Rwanda.
As part of the German East Africa from 1897 to 1918, Rwanda became a Belgium trusteeship under a League of Nations mandate after World War 1 along with neighboring Burundi. During the colonial period of Rwanda under the rule of the Belgians, the minority Tutsi were favored over the Hutus. During this period, tendencies of the few to oppress the many were exacerbated creating a legacy of tension that exploded into violence and this was even before Rwanda gained its independence.
A Hutu revolution in 1959, forced Tutsi as many as 330,000 to flee the country making them an even smaller minority. By the early 1961, the Hutus had forced Rwanda’s Tutsi Monarch into exile and declared the country a republic. After a United Nations referendum that same year, colonial masters of Rwanda – The Belgium officially granted independence to Rwanda in July 1962.
Following the independence, ethnically motivated violence continued and in 173, a military group installed Major General Juvenal Habyarimana, a moderate Hutu in power. As a sole leader of Rwandan government for the next 2 decades, Habyarimana founded a new political party in the names of The National Revolutionary Movement for Development (NRMD). Under a new constitution ratified in 178 he was elected president and re-elected in 183 and 188 when he was the sole candidate
In 1990, forces of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) consisting mostly of Tutsi refugees, invaded Rwanda from Uganda and Habyarimana accused Tutsi residents of being accomplices to the RPF and arrested hundreds of them.
Between 1990 and 1993, government officials resulted into massacres of the Tutsi and killing of hundreds. In 12, a ceasefire in hostilities led to negotiations between the government of Rwanda under Habyarimana and the RPF in 1992.
In August 13, 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 the Hutu extremists who in return took a swift and horrible action to prevent it.
The Rwanda Genocide Begins
On April 6th, 1994, the plane carrying Habyarimana and the then president of Burundi Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down over Kigali – the capital city of Rwanda and no one survived, though the culprits have never been identified. The Hutu extremists were blamed and some people blamed the leaders of the RPF.
In a duration of 1 hour after the plane crash, the Presidential Guards together with members of the Rwandan armed forces (FAR) and Hutu Miltia groups known as the Interahamwe (those who attack together) and Impuzamugambi (Those who have the same goal) set up roadblock and barricades and began slaughtering Tutsis and moderate Hutus with impunity.
The moderate Hutu Prime Minister Agatha Uwilingiyimana and 10 Belgian peacekeepers were among the first victims of the genocide and they were killed on April 7th, this violence created a political vacuum into which an interim government of extremist Hutu Power leaders from the military high command steeped in on April 9th.
The killing of the Belgium peacekeepers provoked the withdrawal of the Belgium troops and the United Nations (UN), directed that the peacekeepers only defend themselves thereafter.
The spread of Killings around Rwanda
The mass killings spread quickly from Kigali city to the rest of Rwanda, in the first 2 weeks the local administrators of central and southern Rwanda which are homes to the Tutsi resisted the genocide and after April 18, the resisters were removed and most of them killed by the national officials.
Other opponents fell silent or were killed, the national officials rewarded the killers with food, drinks, drugs and money. Government sponsored radio stations also started calling on ordinary Rwanda civilians to murder their neighbors and with 3 months over 800,000 people had been slaughtered.
The RPF resumed fighting and civil war raged alongside the genocide, by early July the RPF forces had gained control over most of country including Kigali, in response to more than 2 million people nearly all Hutus fled Rwanda and crowded into refugee camps in the Congo and other neighboring countries such as Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.
After the victory of RPF, it established a coalition government similar to that agreed upon at Arusha with Pasteur Bizimungu –a Hutu as a president and Paul Kagame a Tutsi as vice president and defense minister.
NRMD’s party Habyarimana who had played a key role in organizing the genocide was outlawed and a new constitution was adopted in 2003 which eliminated reference to ethnicity, this 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 to the genocide
The international community largely remained on the sidelines during the Rwandan genocide as detailed below
- In April 14, A United Nations Security Council vote led to the withdrawal of most of the United Nations peacekeeping operations (UNAMIR) which created the previous fall to aid with governmental transition under the Arusha accord.
- Following the spread of the reports concerning the genocide, the Security Council voted in Mid – May to supply a more robust force including more than 5,000 troops. By the time the forced arrived in full, the genocide had been over for months.
- In a separate French Intervention approved by the U.N, the 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. This resulted into saving tens of thousands of Tutsi lives but also helping some of the genocide’s plotters – allies of the French during the Habyarimana regime to escape.
In the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide, many of the 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 occurrence of the atrocities.
From the interview on the PBS news program Frontline, General Boutrous Boutrous – Ghhali – a UN Secretary said “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”.
