Rwandan genocide

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Fish caught in Lake Victoria became unsellable in 1994, because of what a river was carrying into the lake. The Kagera River runs along the northern border between Rwanda and Uganda, and thousands of bodies were dumped into it. Consumers feared the catch was tainted, which badly damaged the Ugandan fishing industry. The Ugandan government sent teams to pull the dead from the water before they reached the lake.

  That grim detail belongs to the Rwandan genocide, also called the Tutsi genocide. It ran from the 7th of April to the 19th of July 1994, during the Rwandan Civil War. In about 100 days, Hutu militias systematically killed members of the Tutsi minority, along with some moderate Hutu and Twa. Many victims were murdered by their own neighbours.

  How does a government persuade villagers to turn on people they have lived beside for years? Who gave the orders, and what carried them into every corner of a small country? Why did governments that held warnings and troops let it run? And what happened when the killing finally stopped?

  538649

• 2. Cards and Castes

  ›

  In the early 1930s, Belgian colonial officials issued every Rwandan a compulsory identity card. Under a heading for ethnicity and race, each card labelled its holder as Tutsi, Hutu, Twa, or Naturalised. The Belgians counted the Hutu as about 84% of the population, the Tutsi as about 15%, and the Twa as about 1%. Until then, a particularly wealthy Hutu could sometimes become an honorary Tutsi. The cards ended that movement and turned social and economic groups into rigid ethnic ones.

  The society the Belgians reshaped was older and more tangled. The Twa, forest hunter-gatherers, settled the land between 8000 and 3000 BCE. Between 700 BCE and 1500 CE, Bantu groups arrived and began clearing forest for farming. Historians disagree about how that happened. One theory holds that Hutu came first and Tutsi arrived later as a distinct, possibly Cushitic, race. Another describes slow migration by newcomers who were genetically close to the established population and blended in. On that view, the Hutu and Tutsi divide came later, and it was a matter of class, with Tutsi herding cattle and Hutu farming.

  Whatever the origin, Hutu, Tutsi and Twa shared one language and are together called the Banyarwanda. They grouped into clans, then by 1700 into around eight kingdoms. From the mid-eighteenth century, the Kingdom of Rwanda, ruled by the Tutsi Nyiginya clan, became dominant through conquest and assimilation. Its peak came under King Kigeli Rwabugiri, who reigned from 1853 to 1895. His administrative reforms opened a rift between Hutu and Tutsi. Under uburetwa, Hutu had to perform forced labour to regain land that had been taken from them. Under ubuhake, Tutsi patrons gave cattle to Hutu or Tutsi clients in return for economic and personal service. Even so, the groups shared clan names, customs and symbols of kinship that bound them together.

  The Berlin Conference of 1884 assigned Rwanda and neighbouring Burundi to Germany, which established a presence in 1897 by allying with the king. Ruling through the monarchy let Germany colonise with few European troops. The Germans favoured Tutsi for administrative posts, believing them to be racially superior migrants from Ethiopia. Belgian forces took over in 1917, during World War I, and moved to more direct rule from 1926. The Belgians modernised the economy but left Tutsi supremacy intact, so the Hutu stayed disenfranchised.

  The "Hamitic" theory, promoted by Christian missionaries, claimed the kingdom had foreign origins and pointed to the supposedly Ethiopian features of the Tutsi "caste". These colonial mythologies later supplied the basis for anti-Tutsi propaganda. Rwandans also had origin stories of their own. In the Tutsi account, the ancient king Kanyarwanda had several sons, among them Gatutsi and Gahutu, which made the two peoples brothers. In the Hutu account, Kigwa, the patrilineal ancestor of Ruhanga and the first Tutsi, fell from the sky onto an earth already inhabited by Hutu.

  In 1957, a group of Hutu scholars wrote the Bahutu Manifesto, the first document to label Hutu and Tutsi as separate races. It demanded that power pass from Tutsi to Hutu under what it called "statistical law". The push followed World War II, when resentment of the inter-war reforms grew and the Catholic Church began to sympathise with the Hutu. Missionaries now saw themselves as champions of the underprivileged, which produced a sizeable Hutu clergy and educated elite. The monarchy and prominent Tutsi sensed the shift and pressed for immediate independence on their own terms.

  On the 1st of November 1959, Dominique Mbonyumutwa, a Hutu sub-chief, was attacked near his home in Byimana by supporters of a pro-Tutsi party. He survived, but a rumour spread that he was dead. Hutu activists answered by killing Tutsi, elite and ordinary civilians alike, and the Rwandan Revolution began. The Belgian administration, keen to overturn Tutsi domination, backed the Hutu. In early 1960 it replaced most Tutsi chiefs with Hutu and held commune elections that returned an overwhelming Hutu majority. The king was deposed, a Hutu-dominated republic took shape, and Rwanda became independent in 1962.

  Four neighbouring countries received the Tutsi who fled the purges: Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania and Zaire. Unlike earlier migrants, these exiles were treated as refugees, and they began agitating almost at once to return. Their armed groups attacked Rwanda with little success, and the attacks brought reprisal killings of 10,000 Tutsi and still more exiles. By 1964, more than 300,000 Tutsi had fled, and they would remain abroad for three decades.

  Grégoire Kayibanda presided over the Hutu republic for a decade, ruling as autocratically as the old monarchy. A coup in 1973 brought Juvénal Habyarimana to power. Discrimination against Tutsi continued, though indiscriminate violence eased somewhat. In 1975 he founded the National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development, the MRND. After a 1978 referendum, a new constitution made Rwanda a one-party state in which every citizen had to belong to it.

  Pressure was also building on the land. Rwanda's population grew from 1.6 million people in 1934 to 7.1 million in 1989, and density reached 408 people per square kilometre, among the highest in Africa. Historians such as Gérard Prunier believe that competition for land partly explains what came in 1994.

  254451412

• 3. Rebels and Extremists

  ›

  Fred Rwigyema led about 500 Rwandan refugees who fought alongside the rebel National Resistance Army in the Ugandan Bush War. That war brought Yoweri Museveni to power by overthrowing Milton Obote. After Museveni's inauguration, the Rwandan soldiers stayed in the Ugandan army and used a covert network inside it to plan an invasion. In October 1990, Rwigyema led more than 4,000 rebels about 60 kilometres into Rwanda under the banner of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, or RPF. He was killed on the third day. France and Zaire sent forces to support the Rwandan army, which repelled the invasion.

  Paul Kagame, Rwigyema's deputy, took command and retreated through Uganda to the Virunga Mountains, a rugged area of northern Rwanda. There he rearmed, reorganised, and raised money and recruits from the Tutsi diaspora. In January 1991 he restarted the war with a surprise attack on the northern town of Ruhengeri, which the RPF held for a day before retreating to the forests. A year of guerrilla raids followed, with some border areas captured but no major gains. In June 1992, after a multiparty coalition government formed in Kigali, the RPF declared a ceasefire and opened talks in Arusha, Tanzania.

  Early 1993 brought the formation of several extremist Hutu groups, which began large-scale violence against Tutsi. The RPF suspended the talks and launched an attack that won a broad swathe of the north. Negotiations resumed, and the Arusha Accords were signed in August 1993. They gave the RPF positions in a Broad-Based Transitional Government and in the national army. A peacekeeping force, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, or UNAMIR, arrived, and the RPF received a base in the parliament building in Kigali.

  On the 11th of October 1990, a pogrom in a commune in Gisenyi Province killed 383 Tutsi. The RPF had just invaded, and President Habyarimana and his hardliners were using the public's fear to advance an anti-Tutsi agenda known as Hutu Power. The core of the hardliners was the akazu, also called the clan de Madame, the family of first lady Agathe Habyarimana. The president relied on them to keep his regime in place. A group of officers and officials founded a popular magazine, Kangura, which printed anti-Tutsi propaganda. Among it were the Hutu Ten Commandments, racist rules that branded Hutus who married Tutsis as "traitors". In 1992 the hardliners created the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic, the CDR, which attacked the president's alleged softness toward the RPF.

  The tactic got a name: "mirror politics", also called "accusation in a mirror". A person accuses others of exactly what he himself wants to do. The president's entourage, including the army, used propaganda to fabricate ethnic crises blamed on the Tutsi and the RPF. The aim was to make an economic, social and political struggle look like an ethnic one.

  After the 1992 ceasefire, extremists in the government and army began plotting against the president himself, worried that Tutsi might join the government. Habyarimana tried to remove hardliners from senior army posts and only partly succeeded. Augustin Ndindiliyimana and Théoneste Bagosora, both akazu affiliates, kept powerful positions. Throughout 1992, hardliners ran localised campaigns of killing against Tutsi. They culminated in January 1993, when extremists and local Hutu murdered around 300 people. The RPF cited those killings as its main reason for resuming war in February 1993, but the effect was to boost extremist support among Hutu.

  From mid-1993, Hutu Power was a third major force in Rwandan politics, alongside the government and the traditional moderate opposition. Apart from the CDR, no party belonged wholly to it. Almost every party split into a moderate wing and a Power wing, each claiming to be its legitimate leadership. Even the ruling party had a Power wing, made up of those who opposed Habyarimana's plan to sign a peace deal. Youth militias grew from these wings. The Interahamwe, meaning "those who stand together", attached to the ruling party. The CDR had the Impuzamugambi, meaning "those who have the same goal". The army trained them, sometimes alongside the French, who did not know their true purpose.

  In 1990, the army began handing out machetes and other weapons to civilians and training Hutu youth, officially as "civil defence" against the RPF. Those weapons were later used in the genocide. The militias drew on Hutu displaced from the north, and claimed 50,000 members on the eve of the genocide. The Rwandan Armed Forces grew in a single year from under 10,000 troops to almost 30,000, and the new recruits were often poorly disciplined. In March 1993, Hutu Power began compiling lists of "traitors" to kill, possibly including Habyarimana himself, whom the CDR had publicly accused of treason. Through 1993, hardliners imported machetes far beyond farming needs, plus razor blades, saws and scissors, and spread them around the country.

  In October 1993, Melchior Ndadaye, elected in June as Burundi's first-ever Hutu president, was assassinated by Tutsi army officers. A civil war and the Burundi genocide followed, killing 50,000 to 100,000 people in the first year. For Rwandan Hutu, it reinforced the notion that Tutsi were enemies who could not be trusted. The CDR and the Power wings saw their chance. The idea of a deliberate, systematic genocide, floated in 1992 as a fringe view, rose to the top of their agenda. Helped by propaganda on a new radio station and by public anger over Ndadaye's murder, they persuaded ordinary Hutu to take part. They also began arming the militias with AK-47s, where before the militias had only machetes and traditional weapons.

  On the 11th of January 1994, General Roméo Dallaire, commander of UNAMIR, sent UN headquarters what became known as the "Genocide Fax". It reported contact with an informant, now known to be Kassim Turatsinze, the chauffeur of Mathieu Ngirumpatse, who went by the name "Jean-Pierre". He said he had been ordered to register all Tutsi in Kigali. He suspected a genocide was being planned and claimed that "in 20 minutes his personnel could kill up to 1000 Tutsis".

  How far the genocide was planned in advance is still debated. Prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the ICTR, argued that the accused planned it beforehand, but they could not prove it. Théoneste Bagosora, the supposed mastermind, was acquitted of conspiracy in 2008, although he was convicted of genocide. In 2010, André Guichaoua, an expert witness for the prosecution, observed that with two exceptions, the trial chambers had uniformly found the proof of a conspiracy wanting.

  221202560

• 4. Radio Machete

  ›

  Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, known as RTLM, was founded by Power groups who thought the national Radio Rwanda had grown too liberal and too friendly to the opposition. The new station aimed at young adults, and its broadcasts reached Rwanda's largely rural population of farmers, unlike newspapers, which were found mainly in cities. It copied Western talk radio, with popular music, interviews and listeners joining in. Its presenters told crude jokes and used offensive language, a sharp contrast with the formal bulletins of Radio Rwanda. Only 1.52% of its airtime went to news, while 66.29% was journalists sharing their thoughts on assorted subjects. The businessman Félicien Kabuga funded both the station and the Interahamwe.

  As the killing approached, the broadcasts turned toward anti-Tutsi propaganda. They portrayed Tutsi as a dangerous enemy who wanted to seize political power from Hutu. By tying the Rwandan Patriotic Army to the Tutsi political party and to ordinary Tutsi citizens, they presented a whole ethnic group as one threat. They also called Tutsi inyenzi, a word for non-human pests or cockroaches, which had to be exterminated. By the time the violence began, young Hutu had absorbed months of this message.

  In the run-up to the genocide, there were 294 instances of RTLM accusing the Rwandan Patriotic Army of atrocities against Hutu. There were also 252 broadcasts calling on Hutu to kill Tutsi. One of them said: "Someone must... make them disappear for good... to wipe them from human memory... to exterminate the Tutsi from the surface of the earth."

  The station's incitement earned it the nickname "Radio Machete". In 2014, David Yanagizawa-Drott, a researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School, found that approximately 10% of the overall violence in the genocide could be attributed to it. Gordon Danning, of the free speech group Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, questioned the paper's assumption that media availability matched media consumption.

  2930312526

• 5. The Night of the Lists

  ›

  The aircraft carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Hutu president of Burundi, was shot down on the 6th of April 1994 as it prepared to land in Kigali. Everyone aboard was killed. Responsibility is disputed, with blame placed on both the RPF and Hutu extremists. In 2006, an eight-year investigation by the French judge Jean-Louis Bruguière concluded that Paul Kagame had ordered the attack. A Rwandan government investigation made public in 2010 blamed Hutu extremists in the army.

  A French investigation was widely reported in January 2012 as clearing the RPF, but Filip Reyntjens says it did not. In November 2014, Emmanuel Mughisa, also known as Emile Gafarita, was abducted in Nairobi. He was a former Rwandan soldier who said he had evidence that Kagame ordered the plane shot down, and he vanished hours after being called to testify at the French inquiry. Despite the disagreement, many observers believe the deaths of the two presidents were the catalyst for the genocide.

  That same evening, a crisis committee formed around Major General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, Colonel Théoneste Bagosora and other senior staff officers. Bagosora headed it, even though Ndindiliyimana outranked him. Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana was next in the line of succession, but the committee refused to recognise her authority. Dallaire met the committee that night and insisted she be put in charge. Bagosora refused, saying she did not "enjoy the confidence of the Rwandan people" and was "incapable of governing the nation". He also told UNAMIR and the RPF that the committee was there to contain a presidential guard he called "out of control".

  Ten Belgian soldiers from UNAMIR were sent to escort Uwilingiyimana to the Radio Rwanda offices so she could address the nation. The plan collapsed when the presidential guard seized the radio station. Later that morning, soldiers and a crowd of civilians overwhelmed the Belgians guarding her and forced them to surrender their weapons. Uwilingiyimana and her husband were killed. Their children survived by hiding behind furniture, and the Senegalese UNAMIR officer Mbaye Diagne rescued them. The ten Belgians were taken to the Camp Kigali military base, tortured and killed. In 2007, a Belgian court sentenced Major Bernard Ntuyahaga, whose presidential guard unit carried out the murders, to 20 years in prison.

  On the night of the 6th and the 7th of April, extremists moved between the houses of Kigali with lists of prominent moderate politicians and journalists. The dead included Joseph Kavaruganda, president of the Constitutional Court, and Frederic Nzamurambaho, the minister of agriculture. Landwald Ndasingwa, leader of the Parti Liberal, was killed with his Canadian wife. So was Boniface Ngulinzira, chief negotiator at Arusha. A few moderates survived, among them prime minister-designate Faustin Twagiramungu. According to Dallaire, "by noon on the 7th of April, the moderate political leadership of Rwanda was dead or in hiding, the potential for a future moderate government utterly lost."

  The army chief of staff, Marcel Gatsinzi, was the exception. The crisis committee rejected Bagosora's preferred candidate, Augustin Bizimungu, and Bagosora had to accept Gatsinzi. Gatsinzi tried to keep the army out of the genocide and to negotiate a ceasefire with the RPF, but he had limited control over his troops. After ten days he was replaced by the hardline Bizimungu.

  Genocidal killings began the following day. Soldiers, police and militia quickly executed the Tutsi and moderate Hutu military and political leaders who could have filled the power vacuum. Bagosora began issuing orders to kill Tutsi at once. He addressed groups of Interahamwe in person in Kigali and telephoned leaders in the prefectures. Other national organisers included defence minister Augustin Bizimana, paratroop commander Aloys Ntabakuze, and Protais Mpiranya, head of the Presidential Guard. Pascal Musabe and Joseph Nzirorera coordinated the militia activities across the country.

  Military leaders in Gisenyi prefecture, the heartland of the akazu, were the first to organise. They gathered the Interahamwe and civilian Hutu and announced the president's death, blaming the RPF. They ordered the crowd to "begin your work" and to "spare no one", including infants. On the 7th of April, the killing spread to Ruhengeri, Kibuye, Kigali, Kibungo, Gikongoro and Cyangugu prefectures. Each time, local officials answering to Kigali first spread rumours that the RPF had killed the president, then commanded people to kill Tutsi.

  The committee appointed an interim government on the 8th of April, using the 1991 constitution instead of the Arusha Accords. Théodore Sindikubwabo became interim president and Jean Kambanda prime minister. Most ministers came from the Power wings of their parties. The government was sworn in on the 9th and relocated from Kigali to Gitarama on the 12th, ostensibly to flee the RPF advance. It gave the regime an air of legitimacy but was effectively a puppet, and Bagosora and the senior officers remained the real rulers. When Dallaire visited its headquarters a week after it formed, he found most officials at leisure. He described their business as "sorting out the seating plan for a meeting that was not about to convene any time soon".

  3233343760

• 6. Neighbours and Sanctuaries

  ›

  At roadblocks across Kigali, everyone had to show the national identity card, which listed ethnicity, and holders of Tutsi cards were killed immediately. The Presidential Guard, the army's elite unit, led the killing in the capital. The Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi manned the roadblocks and searched houses, killing Tutsi and looting their property. Tharcisse Renzaho, prefect of Kigali-ville, toured the roadblocks to check they were effective. He also used his post to pass on orders and dismiss officials who were not active enough. Hutu were killed as well, for sympathising with moderate parties, for being journalists, or simply for having a "Tutsi appearance".

  In the countryside, the chain of command ran through ordinary local government. Each prefect passed instructions from Kigali to the commune leaders, the bourgmestres, who relayed them to the leaders of sectors, cells and villages. Most of the killing was done by ordinary civilians under those leaders. Villagers all knew one another, so Hutu could easily pick out their Tutsi neighbours. Gérard Prunier explains the mass participation through three forces: a "democratic majority" ideology that taught Hutu to see Tutsi as dangerous enemies, a culture of unbending obedience to authority, and duress. Villagers who refused to kill were often branded Tutsi sympathisers and murdered. In the words of one account: "Either you took part in the massacres or you were massacred yourself."

  The phrase "a cascade of tipping points" captures a rival reading. On that view, the genocide was not sudden or uniformly orchestrated, but grew out of local contests for dominance among Hutu. The protracted struggles in local communes imply that a more determined stance from the international community would likely have prevented the worst.

  Butare prefecture was run by Jean-Baptiste Habyalimana, the only Tutsi prefect in the country. It was also the only prefecture dominated by an opposition party. Habyalimana refused to authorise any killings, and for a while Butare became a sanctuary for Tutsi refugees from elsewhere. On the 18th of April, the interim government dismissed him and installed the loyalist Sylvain Nsabimana. The local population still resisted murdering its fellow citizens, so the government flew in militia from Kigali by helicopter, and they killed readily.

  On the 9th of April, UN observers witnessed the massacre of children at a Polish church in Gikondo. Hutu gangs hunted for victims hiding in churches and school buildings and massacred them. On the 11th of April, thousands of people had gathered at the Official Technical School in Kigali, where Belgian UNAMIR soldiers were stationed. The Belgians withdrew that day, and Rwandan armed forces and militia killed all the Tutsi sheltering there. The next day, more than 1,500 Tutsi took refuge in a Catholic church in Nyange, in Kivumu commune. Local Interahamwe, acting with the authorities, used bulldozers to knock the building down. They killed every person who tried to escape, using machetes and rifles.

  The local priest, Father Athanase Seromba, was sentenced by the ICTR in 2006 to 15 years in prison, increased on appeal to life. The court heard that he lured the Tutsi to the church, where they believed they would be safe. He then ordered bulldozers to crush the refugees inside and told Hutu militias to kill any survivors. At Sovu, the Catholic nuns Maria Kisito and Gertrude Mukangango were convicted in 2001 over the murders of 5,000-7,000 Tutsi who had sought refuge at their convent. Witnesses testified that they directed a death squad to the hiding place of 500-700 victims and supplied the petrol used to burn the building.

  Pope John Paul II, in a message to Rwandan Catholics on the 9th of April, urged them "not to give way to feelings of hatred and revenge but to courageously practice dialogue and forgiveness". The Catholic Church affirms that genocide took place but says those who took part acted without its permission. In its 1999 report, Human Rights Watch faulted Catholic, Anglican and other Protestant authorities for failing to condemn the genocide, though that accusation was belied over time. Many clergymen gave their lives trying to protect Tutsi, while others joined the massacres. Bishop Misago was accused of complicity and cleared of all charges in 2000. On the 20th of March 2017, Pope Francis acknowledged that some priests and nuns had been complicit in preparing and carrying out the genocide.

  Some experts estimate that between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped during the genocide. In his 1996 report, the UN Special Rapporteur Rene Degni-Segui wrote: "Rape was the rule and its absence was the exception." He added: "Rape was systematic and was used as a weapon." The Interahamwe were the chief perpetrators, but soldiers, including the Presidential Guard, and civilians also committed rape. Tutsi women were the main targets. Moderate Hutu women were also raped, as were Hutu women married to Tutsi or hiding them.

  Propaganda had depicted Tutsi women as "a sexually seductive 'fifth column' in league with the Hutus' enemies". Attackers forced others to stand by and watch. Marie Louise Niyobuhungiro testified that local people and Hutu men watched her being raped about five times a day, and that she was forced to farm between assaults. Hutu extremists also released hundreds of AIDS patients from hospitals and formed them into "rape squads", meant to bring a "slow, inexorable death" to their victims. Thousands of widows, many of them raped, contracted HIV.

  5556895993

• 7. Bystanders

  ›

  On the 9th of April, The Washington Post reported that Rwandan employees of relief agencies had been executed in front of their expatriate colleagues. That same day, 1,000 heavily armed and well-trained European troops arrived to evacuate European civilians. They did not stay to help UNAMIR. Two days later, the Swiss journalist Jean-Philippe Ceppi described the events as genocide for the first time, in the French daily newspaper Libération.

  UNAMIR had been in Rwanda since October 1993, authorised by Security Council Resolution 872 to oversee the Arusha Accords. Roméo Dallaire had learned of Hutu Power's plans for mass extermination, and an informant told him of secret weapons caches. The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations refused his request to raid them. It felt he was exceeding his mandate and had to be kept "on a leash". Critics argue that seizing the weapons fell squarely within the mission's mandate, since both sides had asked for UNAMIR. By April 1994, the Security Council was threatening to end the mission if it made no progress.

  Once the killing began, Dallaire repeatedly met the crisis committee and the RPF, trying to restore peace. Neither side wanted a ceasefire. The government was controlled by the genocidaires, and the RPF believed it had to keep fighting to stop the killings. UNAMIR's Chapter VI mandate left it unable to intervene militarily, and most of its Rwandan staff were killed in the early days. Dallaire later labelled the mission a "failure". Its most significant contribution was sheltering thousands of Tutsi and moderate Hutu at Amahoro Stadium and other secure UN sites, and helping evacuate foreign nationals.

  On the 12th of April, Belgium announced it was withdrawing. It was one of the largest troop contributors and had lost soldiers protecting the prime minister. On the 17th of May, the UN passed Resolution 918, which imposed an arms embargo and reinforced the mission as UNAMIR II. The new soldiers did not begin arriving until June. After the genocide ended in July, the mission's role was largely limited to security and stability, until it closed in 1996.

  France had been close to Habyarimana as part of its Françafrique policy, and had helped Rwanda militarily against the RPF. It saw the RPF and Uganda as part of a "plot" to expand Anglophone influence at French expense. In the first days of the genocide, France launched Amaryllis, a military operation to evacuate expatriates, with help from the Belgian army and UNAMIR. The French and Belgians refused to take any Tutsi. Those who boarded the evacuation trucks were forced off at government checkpoints and killed. The French also separated several expatriates and children from their Tutsi spouses, saving the foreigners and leaving the Rwandans to likely death. They did rescue several high-profile members of Habyarimana's government, along with his wife, Agathe.

  On the 23rd of June, around 2,500 soldiers entered southwestern Rwanda as part of the French-led, UN-mandated Opération Turquoise. It was meant as a humanitarian mission to protect displaced persons, refugees and civilians in danger. Operating from bases in the Zairian cities of Goma and Bukavu, the French set up a zone in the Cyangugu-Kibuye-Gikongoro triangle, covering about a fifth of Rwanda. Radio France International estimates that it saved around 15,000 lives. The genocidal authorities displayed the French flag on their own vehicles, yet killed Tutsi who came out of hiding seeking protection. Many Rwandans read the mission as a way to shield Hutu from the RPF, and its presence temporarily stalled the RPF's advance.

  Several inquiries have examined French involvement. A 1998 French Parliamentary Commission accused France of errors of judgement, including military cooperation amid ethnic tensions, massacres and violence, but not of direct responsibility. A 2008 report by the Rwandan government-sponsored Mucyo Commission accused France of knowing about the preparations and helping train Hutu militia members. In 2019, President Macron commissioned a new team to go through the state archives. In April 2021, the Rwandan government announced a study it had commissioned, alleging that France "did nothing" to prevent massacres it called foreseeable. In December 2017, media reports had revealed that France kept supporting the Hutu government after the genocide began.

  In her 2004 book, Linda Melvern documented that in the three years from October 1990, Rwanda became the third largest importer of weapons in Africa, spending an estimated $US 112 million. The country was one of the poorest in the world. She cited a significant contract with Egypt in 1992, and with France and South Africa the next year. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then Egypt's foreign minister and later UN Secretary-General, facilitated a large sale of arms. Human Rights Watch says that after the 17th of May 1994 embargo, South Africa and France diverted their arms trade through Goma airport in Zaire. Zaire played a key role in supplying the Rwandan army. In 2017, Haaretz reported that Israel or Israeli private dealers had sold arms to the Rwandan government. Israeli officials repeatedly denied it, and the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that its arms-sale records would stay sealed.

  Intelligence reports show that President Bill Clinton and his cabinet knew, before the massacres peaked, that a deliberate and systematic genocide of all Tutsi was planned. Fear of a repeat of Somalia shaped American policy. Crowds had dragged the bodies of US casualties through the streets of Mogadishu after the Battle of Mogadishu. Walter Clarke, a former US deputy special envoy to Somalia, said: "The ghosts of Somalia continue to haunt US policy. Our lack of response in Rwanda was a fear of getting involved in something like a Somalia all over again." Clinton later named the failure to intervene as one of his main foreign policy failings. He said: "I don't think we could have ended the violence, but I think we could have cut it down. And I regret it." Eighty percent of the discussion in Washington concerned evacuating American citizens.

  6083848595

• 8. Victory and Aftermath

  ›

  On the 7th of April, as the killing started, RPF commander Paul Kagame warned the crisis committee and UNAMIR that he would resume the civil war unless it stopped. The next day, government forces attacked the national parliament building from several directions, and the RPF troops stationed there fought them off. The RPF then attacked from the north on three fronts, aiming to link up with its isolated troops in Kigali. Kagame refused to talk to the interim government, which he believed was a cover for Bagosora's rule. UNAMIR attempted numerous ceasefires through April, and each time Kagame said the RPF would not stop unless the killings did.

  By late April, the RPF held the whole Tanzanian border area and began moving west from Kibungo, south of Kigali. It avoided attacking Kigali or Byumba directly and instead tried to encircle the cities and cut supply routes. It also let Tutsi refugees from Uganda settle behind the front line. By the 16th of May, it had cut the road between Kigali and Gitarama. On the 13th of June it took Gitarama itself, forcing the interim government to move to Gisenyi in the far northwest. Kagame recruited heavily throughout, adding Tutsi survivors and refugees from Burundi, though the new recruits were less disciplined.

  The RPF spent the second half of June fighting for Kigali. Government forces had more manpower and weapons, but the RPF steadily gained ground and made raids to rescue civilians from behind enemy lines. Dallaire credited this to Kagame being a "master of psychological warfare". He exploited the fact that government forces were focused on the genocide rather than the fight for Kigali, and he capitalised on their falling morale. The RPF defeated the government forces in Kigali on the 4th of July, and took Gisenyi and the rest of the northwest on the 18th of July. The interim government fled into Zaire, and the genocide ended the following day. Rwanda marks the 4th of July as Liberation Day, a public holiday. At the end of July, Kagame's forces held the whole country except the zone occupied by the French-led force.

  The constitution of Rwanda states that more than 1 million people were killed, and the RPF government claimed 1,074,017 deaths, 94% of them Tutsi. Human Rights Watch, after on-the-ground research, estimated 507,000. A 2020 symposium of the Journal of Genocide Research judged the official figure not credible, because it overestimates the number of Tutsi living in Rwanda beforehand. Using different methods, its scholars estimated 500,000 to 600,000 deaths, around two-thirds of the Tutsi population. Other scholarly estimates run as high as 662,000. About 400,000 children were orphaned, and nearly 85,000 of them were forced to head families. An estimated 2,000,000 Rwandans, mostly Hutu, became refugees.

  The Batwa, or Twa, made up about 1% of Rwanda's population. They were not directly targeted by the genocidaires, yet an estimated 10,000 of a population of 30,000 were killed, and 30% is another figure given. They are sometimes called the "forgotten victims". In the months before the genocide, Hutu radio stations accused the Batwa of aiding the RPF, and survivors describe Hutu fighters threatening to kill them all.

  RPF soldiers also killed many people during the genocide and in the months after, though the number is disputed. Alison Des Forges was among the first researchers to conclude that these killings were systematic and directed by high-ranking officers. She estimated that the RPF killed around 30,000 people it considered enemies of the Tutsi. In early 1996, ICTR investigators reportedly found two layers of bodies in a mass grave in Kibuye. One layer was genocide victims, the other Hutu civilians killed by the RPF. The Rwandan government then prohibited further forensic investigation, and André Guichaoua charged it with deliberately destroying evidence. The post-genocide government says undisciplined recruits seeking revenge carried out the killings and were promptly punished.

  The first rumours emerged after 250,000 mostly Hutu refugees streamed into Tanzania at the Rusumo crossing on the 28th of April 1994. Afterwards, the UN refugee agency sent a team led by Robert Gersony to study prospects for refugees' return. After interviewing 300 people, Gersony concluded that "clearly systematic murders and persecution of the Hutu population in certain parts of the country" had occurred. The United Nations suppressed his findings, and a summary of his oral presentation leaked only in 2010. He put RPF killings between April and August 1994 at between 25,000 and 45,000 people. One RPA officer said recruits had been taken in without screening: "We needed a force, and some of those recruited were thieves and criminals." In an interview with the journalist Stephen Kinzer, Kagame acknowledged that killings had occurred but said rogue soldiers carried them out and they were impossible to control. In 1995, at Kibeho, soldiers opened fire on a camp for displaced people. Australian soldiers serving with UNAMIR estimated at least 4,000 dead, while the Rwandan government claimed 338.

  About two million Hutu fled to camps in neighbouring countries, particularly Zaire, fearing RPF reprisals. The camps were crowded and squalid, and thousands died of cholera and dysentery. The UN refugee agency set them up, but the army and government of the former Hutu regime effectively controlled them. Many leaders of the genocide were there, and they began rearming to try to return to power. By late 1996, Hutu militants were making regular cross-border incursions, and the RPF-led government launched a counteroffensive. Rwanda armed and trained the Banyamulenge, a Tutsi group in Zairian South Kivu province, and they attacked the camps alongside Rwandan forces. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled. Many went back to Rwanda, while others pushed deeper into Zaire, where one estimate says 232,000 Hutu refugees were killed.

  Kagame also wanted dictator Mobutu Sese Seko gone, because Mobutu had supported the genocidaires in the camps. Together with Uganda, Rwanda backed an alliance of four rebel groups led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, which began the First Congo War in 1996. The rebels took North and South Kivu, then advanced west against a poorly organised Zairian army and controlled the whole country by 1997. Mobutu fled into exile, and Zaire was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 1998 Rwanda fell out with the new government and Kagame backed a fresh rebellion, which began the Second Congo War. It lasted until 2003 and caused millions of deaths. Proxy militias have kept fighting in the Goma region, including the M23 rebellion of 2012-2013. By 1999, inside Rwanda, a programme of propaganda and Hutu integration into the national army defeated the insurgency.

  Today Rwanda commemorates the genocide with public holidays. It has also passed laws criminalizing "genocide ideology" and "divisionism".

  148572100