Rwandan Genocide
Between 500,000 and a million Rwandans were murdered in a hundred days in 1994, most of them with machetes. The categories were colonial in their modern form. Belgian administration had issued identity cards recording Hutu, Tutsi or Twa in the 1930s, hardened a social distinction into a racial one, governed through the Tutsi minority, and then switched sides at independence. Massacres and expulsions of Tutsi ran from 1959 onwards, and the refugee communities in Uganda produced the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which invaded in 1990 and fought a war ending in the Arusha accords of 1993. The genocide was planned during the peace process by an inner circle around the president's family: militia recruited and trained, weapons imported and distributed, lists compiled, and a radio station broadcasting names, addresses and instructions. The signal was the shooting down of the president's aircraft on 6 April 1994. The killing began that night in Kigali with the murder of moderate Hutu politicians and the ten Belgian peacekeepers guarding the prime minister, which was calculated to produce exactly what it produced: Belgium withdrew its contingent, and the Security Council cut the United Nations force from 2,500 to 270. Neighbours killed neighbours at parish churches and roadblocks. The RPF ended it militarily in July, and two million people fled into Zaire, taking the génocidaires with them and igniting the Congo wars. The tribunal at Arusha convicted 62 people over twenty years, and the community gacaca courts tried about a million. The failure of the outside world is unusually well documented. The force commander sent a fax in January warning of the arms caches and the killing lists and was told not to act, the word genocide was deliberately avoided in Washington because using it would have triggered obligations, and France's operation in the south-west sheltered the retreating organisers.
- Year: 1994 CE
- Category: Political
