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Ethnic Violence And The Rwandan Genocide

Decent Essays

It took a while before the Rwandan Genocide was put to a halt and by then, the damage was beyond repairable. In the span of 100 days, the RPF started to “make gains on both the battlefield and in the negotiations led by Tanzania”. In the beginning of July, the RPF gained authority over the majority of the country and many Hutus left the country to go to Zaire, which is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. After the genocide, the RPF created a coalition government with a Hutu, Pasteur Bizimungu as president and a Tutsi, Paul Kagame with the role of vice president and defense minister. Eventually, due to conflicts Pasteur Bizimungu was jailed because he encouraged ethnic violence and then Paul Kagame became president in the aftermath. …show more content…

At the end of 2014, the ICTR shut down. Clearly, the aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide could have been avoided and prevented.
Even though, the Hutus were the main perpetrators, the United States and other international countries are just as guilty and play a role in the Rwandan genocide. From the start of the genocide, they knew about the danger and disorder in Rwanda, yet they didn 't intervene. Also, before the genocide occurred General Romeo Dallaire, the commander of the UN Peacekeepers in Rwanda, provided a infamous “genocide fax” to warn them about the “anti-Tutsi extermination” plot. The media provided extensive eyewitness accounts and stories from missionaries about their Rwandan friends who were in the hands of death. In the Washington Post and the New York Times, the stories were there on the first page and there were descriptions about six foot piles of corpses. However, nothing was done and the entire situation was ignored and denied as a genocide. Not all this, there were Defense Intelligence Agency reports, which said the killing were “administered by the government and intelligence memos that reported the ringleaders of the genocide”. Regardless, President Clinton attempted to not get the U.S. involved because U.S. interests didn 't lie in Rwanda, so as a senior U.S. Official described it, it was “a foregone

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