Genocide in Rwanda Essay

When Belgium brought in colonialism they also brought in the Catholic Church. This irritated the Tutsi and they started to get agitated against Belgium authority. The Tutsi felt that Rwanda was just fine and there didn’t need to be anything changed. The negative response towards the new colonial economy and the Catholic Church that the Belgians brought in will end up coming back at the Tutsi. The Belgians saw this negative attitude and because of this attitude from the Tutsi the Belgians switched there support toward the Hutu. Since the Tutsi did not treat the Hutu with much respect in the past years the Hutu could take advantage of this support from the Belgians and payback the Tutsi’s for how they treated them in past years.

The Hutus are now in the position of power; the Hutu officials began to carry out massive genocides on the Tutsis. According to Document 8 it states, “The Hutu officials who took over the government organized the murders [of Tutsis] nationwide…Meanwhile, when the murders started the RPF [Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front] in Uganda invaded Rwanda again.” This quote demonstrates the back and forth genocide each ethnic group is imposing on each other. The genocide in Rwanda was sparked by the death of the Hutu Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, when his place was shot down. Many Hutus blamed the Rwandan Patriotic Front and instantly started campaigns of slaughter. This also provided additional reasons why the Hutu had hatred against the Tutsis. According to Document 9a it states, “Over the course of the genocide nearly one million people were killed.” This shows how extreme the genocide was and how extensive the genocide

In midst of making meticulous plans, the anti-Tutsi Hutu’s had hopes to slaughter a list of Tutsis and their Hutu sympathizers. That being said, how the key international leaders should have acted during these times of structural violence remains abstruse, “the belief was that the price to the world of such a risk would not be as great as the price of inaction” (Gourevitch 1998: 169). The international community had deployed from their legal responsibilities to mitigate the colossal humanitarian tragedy. The peace-keepers at the time of genocide express that they did not have enough militants to save thousands of lives or act quickly enough. Although the peace-keepers had good intentions, an intelligence capability for early warnings and planning could have been useful during these times of tragedy in

Bang!Boom! The Hutus entered Tutsis homes and started to kill using machetes, guns and their hands. They killed the young, old, disabled, it didn’t matter. On the night of April 7th,1994 the elimination of the Tutsi race began.The Hutu and Tutsis did not live in perfect harmony before the invasion of Europeans. Major problems did not occur until after colonialism was over. When the Europeans settled down, they divided Hutus and Tutsis by their physical traits. Tutsis were favored by the Europeans causing hatred from Hutus. With their division amongst different races, European colonialism put Rwanda on the road to genocide.The mass murder of millions of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the Rwandan Genocide was driven by the imperialistic motives of the Belgian government.

Since Burundi’s independence in 1962, there have been two instances of genocide: the 1972 mass killings of Hutus by the Tutsi-dominated government, and the 1993 mass killings of the Tutsis by the Hutu populace. Both of these events in Burundi received different levels of attention by the international community and the western media due to a lack of foreign governmental interest, political distraction, and an unwillingness to acknowledge the severity of these atrocities in Burundi. Interestingly, events of genocide occurring at times without these distractions received more foreign attention than those ignored due to these factors. Because of this, much of the western world is unaware of the Burundian genocide and events similar to it.

In a certain way comparing to the Nazi genocide of World War II, the well-organized and well trained leaders were able to create a mass appeal of fear and hatred that had the result of controlling the common people. It also controlled members of the educated elite like doctors, priests, teachers, human rights activists to commit horrible deeds against friends, colleagues, and neighbors, as well as strangers. Towards the end of the genocide, Tutsis fled to places that were thought to be safe like hospitals, churches, and schools—but such shelter only made it easier for the Hutus to find and kill them. In fact, ordinary Hutu citizens represented the strongest Hutu killing force in the country. Pressured by the Interahamwe and RTLM, and supported by the country’s history of unpunished violence against Tutsis,

In the course of a hundred days in 1994, over 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed in the Rwandan genocide. It was the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century. My thesis is that the international community utterly failed to prevent and stop this atrocity. I will focus on numerous interconnected aspects that led to international inaction and also on the main actors, Belgium, the United Nations Secretariat, the United States and France, that knew that there was genocide underway in Rwanda - therefore, they had a responsibility to prevent and stop the genocide, but lacked political will. This led to inaction at the level of the Security Council (SC), where member states

The genocide started with the assassination of the Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira, when the their plane was shot down on April 6, 1994. The current President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, was suspected to have influenced this assassination because he was the leader of a rebel Tutsi group and Habyarimana was a Hutu. Due to his death the Hutu rebel groups, such as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), arose because they had felt threatened by their past violent history. The Hutu and the Tutsi lived within the precolonial Kingdom of Burundi in 1972 which was ruled by the Tutsi. The government became increasingly dangerous for the Hutu people, “In 1929, the Belgians decided to merge

Beginning on April 7, 1994, the Rwandan Genocide was a period of mass slaughter that followed the closure of the Rwandan Civil War between two major ethnic groups , the Hutus and Tutsis. After the assassination of Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, the uneasy ceasefire between the Hutu controlled government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (who were Tutsi backed rebels) was broken, sparking a systematic effort by police and militia to execute both Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Over the span of several months, Hutu civilians were not only encouraged, but pressured to maim and kill Tutsis - eventually leading to the decimation of 70% of the Tutsi population and 20% of the Hutu population. While the genocide continued, the UN and countries such

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.

April 7, 1994 marked the beginning of one hundred days of massacre that left over 800,000 thousand dead and Rwanda divided by a scare that to this day they are trying to heal. The source of this internal struggle can be traced back to the segregation and favoritism established by Belgium when they received Rwanda after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1918. At the time the Rwandan population was 14% Tutsi, 1%Twa, and 85% Hutus; the Belgian’s showed preferential treatment to the Tutsi, who were seen as socially elite, by giving them access to higher educations and better employment. This treatment causes the uprising of the Hutus in 1959 overthrowing the Tutsi government forcing many to flee the country, sparking even greater resentment between the two ethic groups. Without the interference and preferential treatment by the Belgian’s this atrocity could have likely been avoided.

After World War I, Rwanda was controlled by Belgium.Due to the fact that the Tutsis were the minority of the population, the Belgians believed they were superior to the Hutus. The Hutus were oppressed and had very little rights, and this mentality that Tutsi were superior led to the tensions between the two ethnic groups. These tensions caused violence before the genocide even began. When

Prior to the onset of the genocide, the Hutus and Tutsis lived relatively in harmony. Although some historians would like to simplify their original exchanges as merely peaceful and democratic, this is not the case. It is important instead to note that Hutus and Tutsis have endured an extremely unequal relationship from the beginning. The Hutu are generally thought of as the primary settlers in this region and the Tutsi and a foreign group that would later come to establish themselves. In actuality, the Twa, a people that is still around today, were the first to inhabit this area, but were quickly outnumbered dominated by the Hutu, with whom they traded goods. Over ten thousand

Not only did Rwanda suffer more massacres (some directed at Hutu) between 1995 and 1998, but Burundi’s civil war continued until 2006. Perhaps worst of all, Eastern Congo after 1996 became the epicenter of what many scholars have dubbed “Africa’s World War The 1994 genocide took the lives of an estimated 800,000 Rwandans, the vast majority of them Tutsi. This genocide–and the world’s utter abandonment of the Rwandan people–should never be forgotten. But nor should we overlook the political and ethnic violence that preceded and followed the genocide, whether in Rwanda, Burundi, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. One can only hope that the next 20 years will be kinder to a region that has suffered so much over the past

The Rwandan Genocide was a dark moment in the modern history of the African continent when long-standing ethnic tensions brought an entire nation to a state of chaos and carnage, in which the government attacked its own people and one neighbor attacked the next. The world, which was slow to respond, allowed many more deaths in Rwanda than what should have happened. After the world’s greatly needed but delayed response, there are many things that we must consider to keep this devastation from happening again. Throughout the Rwandan genocide, the Tutsi were targeted due to ethnic tension and disagreements with the Hutu, resulting in about 500,000 Tutsi killed.