The missile that shot down Habyarimana's plane shattered that agreement. We still don't know today whether Tutsi rebels or Hutu extremists opposed to the peace agreement fired the missile, but it quickly became irrelevant. T he Hutu ethnic supremacists saw a green light to begin their extermination campaign. On April 7th, the killing began. Hutu militias, most infamously the government-backed Interahamwe, went city-to-city and village-to-village, slaughtering Tutsis with guns and machetes.
The militias were horrifyingly efficient, using a radio station to coordinate the beginnings of the campaign around the country and to tell people where " the graves were not quite yet full. Unlike earlier mass killings, such as the Holocaust, the international community had advance evidence of the coming genocide. Once it launched, they had evidence of where it was going, and still did nothing.
Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, who commanded the small UN observer force tasked with implementing the peace agreement, heard the Hutus were planning genocide in January He informed the higher-ups at the UN, but wasn't permitted to act.
Even after the genocide began, and the evidence of slaughter became undeniable, the international community did nothing. In hindsight, there's a good chance the UN could have done something. General Dallaire believes that, with an extra 5, troops and a stronger UN mandate, he could have saved " hundreds of thousands. Two major Obama administration officials — Susan Rice and Samantha Power — became converted to the cause of humanitarian intervention in part due to America's inaction in Rwanda.
The day after the genocide began, the Tutsi rebel group RPF, led by Paul Kagame, launched an offensive aimed at toppling the Rwandan government. In about one hundred days, the RPF defeated the government forces. Kagame, a Tutsi, became the country's leader in all but name: a Hutu was technically made president while Kagame was vice president, but Kagame controlled the army.
Sadly, there's no reason to stop worrying about Rwanda even 20 years after the genocide. Though the RPF stopped the genocide from reaching its completion, their victory was hardly clean. These "revenge killings" by oppressed are sadly common after episodes of mass killing, and one reason why the lack of international peacekeeping forces can be so devastating.
That war, the deadliest since World War 2 , was sparked in part by 2 million Hutus fleeing Rwanda attacking Tutsis. Some of the 2 million were militiamen, who attacked Tutsis in the DRC. In addition to preparing the militia as an increasingly effective strike force, political and military leaders affiliated with Habyarimana moved to establish the long-discussed self-defense organization.
A week after the Hutu Power rally in late October , a commission of Rwandan army officers met to organize the program. It was neither signed nor dated, but its authenticity was established by Jean Kambanda, prime minister of the interim government during the genocide.
In a statement to the ICTR Appeals Chamber, Kambanda identified the document, said it was regarded as highly confidential, and said that it clearly predated April Through analysis of the content and through comparison with other documents and witness interviews, it appears that the document dates to mid-February or at the latest to March It is important to note who is to participate in the planned program, the proposed organizational structure, the weapons called for, and the description of the groups to be targeted by its activities.
The plan, to be implemented under the general chairmanship of the ministers of interior and defense, created a complex hierarchy of organs and committees to coordinate military, administrative, and political actors. It assigned a variety of tasks from the level of the presidency and the military general staff down to the level of the administrative sector, but in a striking omission, it assigned no task to the prime minister.
The prime minister in the months before April , Agathe Uwiliyigiyimana, was not counted among the supporters of Hutu Power and so despite her office, her ethnicity Hutu , and her political credentials, she was not included in the plan.
Similarly, of the four burgomasters in the city of Kigali, one was not involved in implementing the plan: he too was Hutu but not a supporter of Hutu Power. In a detailed analysis of requirements by commune, the plan called for supplying participants with 4, firearms and , bullets. He said that the minister of defense and minister of interior were to be contacted to obtain the necessary firearms for the civilians.
The military commander for operations in the city, present at the meeting, indicated that some parts of the city were already organized and awaiting arms and other supplies. It was reported that other civilian self-defense efforts were already underway in areas outside the city and should continue in collaboration with administrative authorities. Given the scarcity of firearms, it was suggested that the burgomasters should instruct people in the use of traditional weapons, including swords, spears, bows and arrows, and machetes.
The commander of operations in the city was asked to quickly prepare lists of members of the armed forces living in residential areas, and the prefect was asked to provide similar information on reservists and reliable civilians as soon as possible.
The next day the prefect of the city of Kigali sent the chief of staff a list of several hundred reservists and others presumably civilians chosen for civilian defense. Their names were listed by cell, sector, and commune, the standard administrative units. Among the false ideas drawn on by political leaders and propagandists backing Habyarimana were the following: Tutsi were foreign to Rwanda and had no right to live there.
Despite the revolution, Tutsi continued to enjoy higher status and greater wealth than Hutu and were in some way responsible for continuing Hutu poverty. There is a famous story that Hutu militiamen attacked a group of school children and ordered them to divide themselves by ethnicity—Hutus on one side, Tutsis on the other.
The children refused. So the militia killed them all. One of the first things the post-genocide government did was to eliminate the ethnic designation on national identity cards, which were manipulated by the Belgians after World War I to divide the population and keep it subjugated. And the national census no longer tracks ethnicity, so at least officially, no one knows how many of one or the other there are.
We are all one nation is the idea. If you ask one of these people what are you, he or she is likely to answer Rwandan. David Guttenfelder and National Geographic staff writer Peter Gwin are currently in Kigali documenting the 20 th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide for National Geographic. This week, they share their words and images from Proof. Guttenfelder is posting these and other iPhone photographs in real time on Instagram at dguttenfelder and natgeo. All rights reserved.
Share Tweet Email. In the s and s, the Belgians made it far harder for the weak to escape repressive officials; not only did they eliminate the multiple hierarchies but they also restricted changes in residence from one region to another and they prohibited new settlement in the forests.
The one avenue of escape still possible was migration abroad and thousands took that route beginning in the s. But those who preferred not to leave Rwanda had little choice but to submit to increased exploitation of officials now freed from the constraints that once limited their demands.
European administrators generally overlooked the abuses of those officials who got the taxes collected, the roads built, and the coffee planted.
They established European-style courts which they expected would protect the ordinary people, but they usually did not. The judges saw themselves as defenders of the elite, not the masses. At the same time that the Belgians enabled the officials to demand more from the people, they decreed that Tutsi alone should be officials. They systematically removed Hutu 6 from positions of power and they excluded them from higher education, which was meant mostly as preparation for careers in the administration.
Thus they imposed a Tutsi monopoly of public life not just for the s and s, but for the next generation as well. The only Hutu to escape relegation to the laboring masses were those few permitted to study in religious seminaries. By assuring a Tutsi monopoly of power, the Belgians set the stage for future conflict in Rwanda. Such was not their intent. They believed Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa were three distinct, long-existent and internally coherent blocks of people, the local representatives of three major population groups, the Ethiopid, Bantu and Pygmoid.
Because Europeans thought that the Tutsi looked more like themselves than did other Rwandans, they found it reasonable to suppose them closer to Europeans in the evolutionary hierarchy and hence closer to them in ability.
Believing the Tutsi to be more capable, they found it logical for the Tutsi to rule Hutu and Twa just as it was reasonable for Europeans to rule Africans. Not surprisingly, Tutsi welcomed these ideas about their superiority, which coincided with their own beliefs. In the early years of colonial rule, Rwandan poets and historians, particularly those from the milieu of the court, resisted providing Europeans with information about the Rwandan past.
But as they became aware of European favoritism for the Tutsi in the late s and early s, they saw the advantage in providing information that would reinforce this predisposition. They supplied data to the European clergy and academics who produced the first written histories of Rwanda. The collaboration resulted in a sophisticated and convincing but inaccurate history that simultaneously served Tutsi interests and validated European assumptions.
According to these accounts, the Twa hunters and gatherers were the first and indigenous residents of the area. The somewhat more advanced Hutu cultivators then arrived to clear the forest and displace the Twa.
Next, the capable, if ruthless, Tutsi descended from the north and used their superior political and military abilities to conquer the far more numerous but less intelligent Hutu.
This distorted version of the past told more about the intellectual atmosphere of Europe in the s than about the early history of Rwanda.
Packaged in Europe, it was returned to Rwanda where it was disseminated through the schools and seminaries. So great was Rwandan respect for European education that this faulty history was accepted by the Hutu, who stood to suffer from it, as well as by the Tutsi who helped to create it and were bound to profit from it.
People of both groups learned to thinkof the Tutsi as the winners and the Hutu as the losers in every great contest in Rwandan history. The polished product of early Rwando-European collaboration stood unchallenged until the s when a new generation of scholars, foreign and Rwandan, began questioning some of its basic assumptions.
Even in the s, many Rwandans and foreigners continued to accept the erroneous history formulated in the s and s. Once the Belgians had decided to limit administrative posts and higher education to the Tutsi, they were faced with the challenge of deciding exactly who was Tutsi. Physical characteristics identified some, but not for all.
The Belgians decided that the most efficient procedure was simply to register everyone, noting their group affiliation in writing, once and for all. All Rwandans born subsequently would also be registered as Tutsi, Hutu, or Twa at the time of their birth.
The system was put into effect in the s, with each Rwandan asked to declare his group identity. This information was entered into records at the local government office and indicated on identity cards which adult Rwandans were then obliged to carry. The establishment of written registration did not completely end changes in group affiliation.
In this early period Hutu who discovered the advantages of being Tutsi sometimes managed to become Tutsi even after the records had been established, just as others more recently have found waysto erase their Tutsi origins.
But with official population registration, changing groups became more difficult. The very recording of the ethnic groups in written form enhanced their importance and changed their character. Meanwhile Hutu, officially excluded from power, began to experience the solidarity of the oppressed.
Belgium continued its support for the Tutsi until the s. Then, faced with the end of colonial rule and with pressure from the United Nations, which supervised the administration of Rwanda under the trusteeship system, the colonial administrators began to increase possibilities for Hutu to participate in public life.
They named several Hutu to responsible positions in the administration, they began to admit more Hutu into secondary schools, and they conducted limited elections for advisory government councils. Hardly revolutionary, the changes were enough to frighten the Tutsi, yet not enough to satisfy the Hutu. With independence approaching, conservative Tutsi hoped to oust the Belgians before majority rule was installed.
Radical Hutu, on the contrary, hoped to gain control of the political system before the colonialists withdrew. The ruler who had been in power since , Mutara Rudahigwa, had served to reassure all parties and to keep the situation calm. But he died unexpectedly in 9 and was succeeded by a young half-brother, Kigeri Ndahindurwa, who appeared to be heavily influenced by the most conservative Tutsi group. In November , several Tutsi assaulted a Hutu sub-chief. As the news of the incident spread, Hutu groups attacked Tutsi officials and the Tutsi responded with more violence.
Several hundred people were killed before the Belgian administration restored order. The Belgians then replaced abouthalf the Tutsi local authorities by Hutu. With the help of many of these local administrators, the Parmehutu easily won the first elections in and In September l, some 80 percent of Rwandans voted to end the monarchy, thus confirming the proclamation of a republic the previous January by the Parmehutu-led government.
In later years, and particularly during the genocide, Hutu politicians waved the flag of the revolution, knowing they would get an overwhelming response from their audiences. In fact the revolution was neither so heroic nor so dramatic as it was later presented.
At the start, Hutu attacked power-holders and those related to them, leaving their ordinary Tutsi neighbors in peace. They usually sought to drive Tutsi away rather than to destroy them. The assailants cleared the north most completely, the area where Tutsi officials had been installed three decades before by the colonial administration. Many displaced Tutsi resettled elsewhere in Rwanda, particularly in the sparsely populated region known as Bugesera, but another 10, took the road to exile.
In some of these refugees began to attack Rwanda, an effort they would repeat ten times over the next six years. But Hutu leaders used them all to bolster the sense of Hutu solidarity, to solidify their own control and to eradicate the last vestiges of respect for Tutsi authority.
From these attacks they crafted the myth of the Hutu revolution as a long and courageous struggle against ruthless forces of repression. In their eyes, the ethnic majority was necessarily the same as the democratic majority.
In attacking the supposed enemies of the nation and the revolution, the Hutu stood to gain, both in the short term from goods pillaged and in the long term from lands appropriated from Tutsi who were driven away. Given the political and material gains from anti-Tutsi violence, officials and others had strong incentives to widen the circle of people targeted from the narrow group of former power-holders to all Tutsi.
By when both the incursions and the attacks on Tutsi within Rwanda ended, Tutsi were at risk of attack for the simple fact of being Tutsi. During these years, some 20, Tutsi were killed and more than , were forced to flee abroad.
The new republican government continued labeling all Rwandans as Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa, but the identity cards which had once served to guarantee privilege to Tutsi now served as a means to discriminate against them, both in employment and in education. Just as the new leaders maintained population registration, so they perpetuated the distorted concepts that had underlain the practice. Following the revolution, the percentage of Tutsi in the Rwandan population declined sharply, partly because many had been massacred or fled, partly because some found ways to redefine themselves as Hutu.
Said to represent Over a period of several years, the Parmehutu leaders, who were based in the south, eliminated Hutu rivals as well as the once powerful Tutsi and created what was in effect a single party state. By the end of the first decade of the republic, however, they were increasingly challenged by Hutu from the north who saw that all rhetoric about Hutu solidarity notwithstanding, the southerners were monopolizing the benefits of power.
Regardless of which group had initiated the campaign, the tactic was clear: seek to resolve differences among Hutu at the expense of the Tutsi. He established the second republic in what was at the time a bloodless coup, although some fifty ofthe most prominent leaders of the first republic subsequently were executed or died in prison.
Over the years, Habyarimana constructed a cohesive monolith, with himself as president of the republic and president of the party and, at each level below him, the relevant government official simultaneously heading the corresponding level of the party. At this time, Rwanda was divided into ten prefectures, 14 each of which included sub-prefectures, administrative units without much political importance.
Below them were the communes, the essential building blocks of the administration. Numbering in , the communes ranged in population from less than 30, for the smallest to over , for the largest, with most counting between 40, and 50, residents. The head of the commune, the burgomaster, of course ranked below the prefect or sub-prefect, but he exercised more immediate and pervasive power over the ordinary people than did his superiors.
In a style that harked back to the pre-colonial and the colonial era, the burgomaster held court one or more times a week, receiving the ordinary people who brought him their grievances or who came to give thanks for help received. He determined the use of land that belonged to the commune or was temporarily under its control. He mediated conflicts over property, settled family disputes, found places in secondary school, dispensed political advice, and even judged a substantial number of cases that in principle should have been taken to court.
In accord with the communal council, he hired and fired the employees of the commune, including the communal policemen who were at his command, and he also intervened in personnel decisions of local schools, health centers, and development projects, although sometimes the presence of expatriates on project staffs limited his influence in this domain.
Although nominally responsible to the minister of the interior, the burgomasters were named by Habyarimana and removed by him. All were known to him and some were very close to him personally. The communes were divided into sectors, each of which had a population of some 5, people.
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