Dbq Essay On Rwanda Genocide

For years, Rwanda has been a hotbed of racial tension. The majority of the Rwandan population is made up of Hutu's, with Tutsi's making up the rest of it. Ever since European colonial powers entered the country and favoured the Tutsi ethnic group over the Hutu by putting Tutsi people in all important positions in society, there has been a decisive political divide between the two groups. This favouring of the Tutsi over the Hutu, and the Hutu subjugation as an ethnic lower class resulted in the civil war and revolution of 1959, where the Hutu overthrew the Tutsi dominated government, and resulted in Rwanda gaining their independence in 1962.

For the past month, people have now just been informed about a war that is going on between the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. This has been going on for about a month and it seems like the death toll is rising rapidly. The assailants of this current genocide are the Hutus. They are targeting members of the minority Tutsi community, as well as their political opponents. This is because the Tutsis have dominated Rwanda for a while and the majority being the Hutus demand change. With the help of accurate organisation, lists of government opponents are handed out to militias who kill them, along with all of their family members.

Lindsey, great discussion post on the Rwanda Genocide. I too wrote my essay on the Rwanda Genocide. It is heartbreaking to read the reality of so many lives being lost. This civil war between the Hutus and the Tutsis was political in nature and directly related to struggles for dominance and supremacy. Lemarchand (n.d.) states, “Hutu and Tutsi shared the same language and culture; the same clan names, the same customs, and the symbols of kingship served as a powerful unifying bond between them” (p.484). As you mentioned, In the 1950s, the Belgian colonial state policies initiated the drastic changes to each ethnic identity, which was the turning point for the change in the society of Rwanda. Rwanda’s colonial period, the Belgians chose the

On the early summer of 1994 the exodus of the Genocide in Rwanda began. Almost 800,000 people were killed in the period of 100 days. All due to bitter accusations from the biggest ethnic group- the Hutus. Somewhere inside Rwanda’s political elite, the group of Hutus aggressively criticised less than half of the Tutsi population, for the incredibly increasing social, economic, and political pressures, within the country, and were also wrongly accused of encouraging a ‘Tutsi-dominated rebel group’. Due to this, and also by the help of propaganda and perpetual political manipulating, the president, Habyarimana, (a Hutu), decided to split up the two ethnic groups, towards the end of 1992.

During the 1990’s the Tutsi and Hutu were already in a bad place after recently being under oppressive Tutsis rule. The Hutu extremist blamed all their country's social and economic problems on the Tutsi people. A civil war was caused after a group of Rwandan exiles formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front: a Tutsi-dominated rebel group, and had attacked Rwanda from their home base in Uganda. The invasion caused tension levels between the two sides to skyrocket

Rwandan Genocide and Ethnic Hatred “At the genocide's peak there were more than five deaths every minute in Rwanda: the rate of killing was three times as rapid as the murder of the Jews in the Second World War.” (5) For centuries, this region of Africa was ruled by many different clans with different religious beliefs and political structures. This even involves modern day Rwanda which is still filled with many different ethnic groups who still do not agree with each other. Some go about resolving their issues peacefully while others do not. The Hutu and the Tutsi people are the two main groups of people that are believed to be the cause of the Rwandan Genocide.

For centuries, two African tribes have made up the majority of the country's population: the Hutus and the Tutsis. The Tutsis dominated Rwanda's economy and politics for centuries. In 1960, the Hutu majority forced the Tutsis to flee the country. Rwanda achieved independence in 1961, the Tutsis that had fled the country formed rebel groups and repeatedly tried to regain control of Rwanda. This led to decades of violence and stress. In the early 1990s, this stress flared dramatically. Violence grew throughout the country and the situation became a

Jews and Nazi’s did not get along because of their differences. This led to Hitler, a Nazi, to create identification cards for all of the Jews. Then this treatment of Jews declined into putting them into concentration camps and forced labor camps, and later killing them off. In Rwanda the Tutsis and the Hutus have different heritage. The Hutus wanted the country for themselves so they started killing every Tutsi they could find.

In the 1990s, the Rwandan population was about 14% Tutsis and 85 % Hutus (XXXXXXXX). This ethnic composition has remained similar since biblical times. As with most civil wars, the aversion between opposing sides, that precipitates the war is usually deeply entrenched. The hate between the Tutsis and the Hutus dates back to the 16th century. The hunter-gatherer Hutus were the original settlers of the Rwanda area around 1000AD, then new farming settlers called Tutsi set up their republic. The Tutsis had status, wealth and controlled the politics. Germans favored the Tutsi when they took control of the territory in 1884. Tutsis garnered favor with the racist Germans because they were taller and had lighter-skin.

One horrific, though often overlooked, genocide took place in Rwanda, Africa from April to July 1994. The tiny, landlocked country saw mass killings and state-sponsored hatred of the Tutsi people by the Hutu. Rwanda was divided into three major clans—the Tutsi, which made up about 15% of the population and were the paler group favored by the English and Belgian colonists, and therefore were originally chosen to rule the country after the European takeover. This greatly angered the Hutus, about 84% of the population, (the Twa, the third group, were only 1% of Rwandans, didn't have much to do with the genocide), so they were eventually given the ability to gain professional political positions as well, a right that had been taken away with the

After World War I, the Belgian colonized the Rwanda and separated them in the system of rigid ethnic classification. Even though the Tutsis represented only fourteen percent in the Rwanda, Tutsis were recognized as the superiority ethnic group from their behavior, height, or skin, which is closed to the white people by Belgian’s perspectives. In short, the amount of Tutsi is the minority in the Rwanda. After World War II, the Belgian governance became weak power among the international systems so that the people of Rwanda started to have different opinions toward their colonizer and criticized that Tutsis are the immigrate regime. Furthermore, in 1959, the movement of decolonization started. Hutu led a revolt and killed thousands of Tutsis

They made roadblocks and took over the whole capital. They went around asking each person to show their identification card, if they were Tutsis they were automatically killed and were shown no mercy. They went house to house assassinating Tutsis, or any Hutu that supported the Tutsis, among those murdered was the Hutu Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana. The Belgium soldiers affiliated with the United Nations were assassinated for trying to protect the Prime Minister. This caused the Belgium troops to retreat. Nobody was safe, if there was any sign of a Hutu being a moderate or were helping the Tutsis, they were automatically slaughtered. In United to End Genocide they articulated, “Detailed lists of Tutsi targets were prepared in advance and government radio stations called upon Rwandans to murder their neighbors. These specific lists included names, addresses and sometimes plate licenses. Through radio hate speech, people were encouraged to take the streets and exterminate those who matched the list.” This indicates that people were being hunted like animals by regular citizens. Everyone listens to the radio so the violence was being enhanced with announcements to kill people. Since some Hutus were being killed as well, the Hutu civilians could have engaged on finding and killing Tutsis in fear of being killed themselves if they did not obey. They may

To accurately come to terms with the events of the genocide, one must be familiar with the history between the Hutus and the Tutsis. The Hutus occupied the region for hundreds of years before the appearance of the Tutsi people. Nonetheless, the Tutsis quickly subjugated the Hutu people through the formation of a feudal state. The Hutus were lowered to peasantry, whereas the Tutsis fashioned warrior kingdoms in Rwanda and Burundi headed by “mwamis” (kings).

The ethnic tension between the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda started out centuries ago, then continued through colonial periods and after independence and eventually caused the genocide in 1994. Several centuries ago, there were three different ethnical groups in Rwanda. The Twas were the original inhabitants of Rwanda. The Hutus were the majority; they were mostly peasant cultivators. The Tutsis were the minority, however, they had cattle ownership (“Rwanda: Background”). They were wealthy, and they generally occupied higher status in social system compared to the Hutus majority (“Rwanda: A Brief History”). After World War I, Rwanda became the League of Nations mandate of Belgium (“The Rwandan Genocide”). In Rwanda, Belgium favored the minor

The Rwanda genocide began in 1994 when an airplane that was carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi crashed, which triggered an organized campaign of violence against the Tutsi minorities across the country that was supported by the military and government. Even ordinary citizens were incited by local officials and the Hutu controlled government to take up arms against them. The Rwandan genocide can be classified as an ethnic conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi, but research has failed to find significant ethnic differences between the two groups. The one thing that can be said to be different is there physical appearance. The exact origins of the Hutus and Tutsis were unknown, because both groups shared the same language (Kinyarwanda) territory, some cultural practices, they intermarried and acknowledged the same king. Hence the Hutu and the Tutsi could not be described correctly as two different ethnic groups.