Rwandan Genocide Research Paper

Genocides happen when ethnic divisions become apparent. Many times, these ethnic divisions were due to colonization from people of different race. These cases are especially true in Africa when Europeans colonized their territory, with clear racial divisions between them (Gavin). These genocides go on because of nations acting on ignorance and refusing to help out the nations in turmoil, allowing the genocides to continue, without wasting their own resources. These nations purposefully ignoring the slaughter of people cause the nations to also be guilty of the genocide underway (“The Heart”). The genocide occurred in Rwanda in Central Africa during 1994. The decades of Tutsi oppression of Hutus and the assassination of President Habyarimana in 1994 led to the genocide in Rwanda.

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.

Rwanda is a country located in the middle of the African continent. The two ethnic groups present in the country lived in peace under their monarch until the arrival of Europeans. The Belgians arrival into Rwandan is what split the two ethnic groups of the Tutsi and Hutus, making them identify themselves with ID cards. This caused tension between the two groups as the Belgians favored the ethnic Tutsi, and made them the head of the government. Decade’s later Hutu extremists would take over the government and have revenge on the Tutsi. The new government would send out broadcasts calling on Hutus to kill their friends and neighbors. The Rwandan genocide would become the worst genocide to ever happen in Africa and one of the worst in the world. Today Rwanda’s recovery is surprisingly fast with the help of multiple nations and organizations. Rwanda’s recovery is nothing short of a miracle and is an amazing story of a war between two peoples.

In Rwanda, in 1994, the United Nations ignored the call to act fast, and only stepped up after hundred days, after close to 800,000 people had lost their lives.

On April 7th, 1994 in the small East African country of Rwanda the darkest and most brutal tragedy occurred, the Rwandan genocide. 800,000 Tutsi’s and Rwandan men and women were grossly slaughtered by the Hutu government. This was one of the worst genocides in history and yet not many people spoke about it, why? I believe many people did not say anything is because they were scared that they would be caught and then killed. A man by the name of Philippe Gaillard was a part of the Red Cross international committee in Kigali. He was one of the few people who spoke up about the tragedies occurring in Rwanda. He told his friend who was a news reporter for the BBC in France and published his story. By Gaillard not “shutting up” about the situation it made the Hutu extremists embarrassed and this lead to the Hutu government allowing the Red Cross committee to have safe passage throughout Rwanda. “America, the beautiful America, the brave”, was what America was known for being, but after the ethnic cleansing of the Rwandan people it changed.

Escaping is a pleasure to some people and to some it was a necessity, like to Jack Werber, “Escape was not our goal since it was so unrealistic. What we wanted was to survive, to live long enough to tell the world what had happened in Buchenwald.” This quote by Jack Werber is inspiring to some people. Jack Werber did live long enough to tell his story, like a lot of Tutsis in the Rwandan genocide. The Rwandan Genocide impacted not only the Tutsis, but the world.

This sparked a massive war, which came to be known as the Rwandan genocide. Extremists created riots and war areas for weeks. In that time over 800,000 men, women and children fell victim to this horrible catastrophe. This genocide event wiped out almost 3/4 of the Tutsi population. This was as close to extinction of a culture anyone has seen before. It took years to return to a normal state of being. All of this resulted from greed, people who wanted to strike fear and hatred into people, only to keep themselves in a powerful position, most likely in government. The United Nations became aware of this massive slaughter eventually, but no-one would step up and acknowledge it as being a genocide, even though this was in exact terms of what it

Before watching this documentary from Frontline, I had never realized about the atrocities that had occurred in Rwanda in 1994. I had been naive in not realizing that mass genocidal killings like the ones shown were happening in our modern world. It was my assumption that international organizations like the United Nations or the United States would take action to prevent these horrendous acts from occurring. It was deeply shocking and overwhelming to see the horrendous acts humans were doing to each other. The murderers in Rwanda acted like savage animals without society or government to stop them from killing 800,000 innocent people. The most interesting aspect of the documentary was learning that the international community failed on purpose and let hundreds of thousands of people die.

The world’s history has been tainted by many instances of violence targeted at specific groups of people due to either their ethnicity or beliefs. This paper will discuss the characteristics of the Rwanda Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust. The Rwanda Genocide targeted the Tutsis because of their ethnicity, while the Holocaust targeted the Jews because of their ethnicity and religion.

On May 25, 1994, U.S. president, Bill Clinton, wrote in a letter to Representative Harry Johnston, “The White House issued a strong public statement calling for the Rwandan Army and the Rwandan Patriotic Front to do everything in their power to end the violence immediately. This followed an earlier statement by me calling for a cease-fire and the cessation of the killings” (qtd. in Baldauf). It seems that by calling out those engaged in the conflict, the U.S. took the responsibility from themselves and took no further action. In the post-Cold War era, it is not surprising that most other countries followed the lead of the U.S. and also chose to not take any significant action

Genocide is “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, ethnic, political, or cultural group”. In Rwanda for example, the Hutu-led government embraced a new program that called for the country’s Hutu people to murder anyone that was a Tutsi (Gourevitch, 6). This new policy of one ethnic group (Hutu) that was called upon to murder another ethnic group (Tutsi) occurred during April through June of 1994 and resulted in the genocide of approximately 800,000 innocent people that even included women and children of all ages. In this paper I will first analyze the origins/historical context regarding the discontent amongst the Hutu and Tutsi people as well as the historical context as to why major players in the international

The absence within the literature of the central pillars and their composed themes creates problems when trying to address current and future contention between the international community and Rwanda. By relying largely on the genocide guilt card, issues important to Rwanda are sometimes either overlooked or plainly forgotten. The result is miscommunication and misunderstandings that complicate a delicate situation. For example is the previously mentioned debate on term limits for President Kagame. Despite the thesis not discussing the third term debate except for the mention in Chapter Two, it is an important event that will help continue the trend of how Rwanda views the actions and decisions by international actors.

The Rwandan president, Habyarimana and the president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, are killed when the president’s plane is shot down near Kigali Airport, on April 6th, 1994. That night on the 6th of April, 1994, the genocide begins. Hutu people take to the streets with guns and machetes. The Hutus set up roadblocks and stopped anyone that looked Tutsi or suspected of helping Tutsi people to hide. On April 7th, 1994 the Rwandan Armed Forces set up roadblocks and went house to house to kill any Tutsis found. Thousands of people die on the first, while the U.N. just stands by and watches the slaughter go on. On April 8th, 1994 the U.N. cuts its forces from 2,500 to 250 after ten U.N. soldiers were disarmed and tortured and shot or hacked to death by machetes, trying to protect the Prime Minister. As the slaughter continues the U.N. sends 6,800 soldiers to Rwanda to protect the civilians, on May 17th, 1994, they were meant to be the peacekeepers. The slaughter continues until July 15th, 1994, in the 100 days that the genocide lasted 800,000-1,000,000 Tutsis and Hutus

Dominant cultures’ demand, based on ideology, politics, and social status, a total acculturation of the minority, which is represented by forms of everyday violence that exclude or restrict based on ethnic identity (Apodaca, 2017). Christopher Taylor (1999), on the Rwandan Genocide, highlights historical restrictions placed on social status, and wealth, whereby Tutsi were favoured and Hutu excluded from higher social standing by colonizing forces that asserted Tutsi as more intelligent and civilized. This was repeated after the paradigm shift to Hutu as the dominant culture whereby they enacted othering and exclusion of Tutsi people based on their ethnic identity, both regimes argued that their dominance was for the greater good of Rwandan

Rwanda is a small country located in central Africa. It borders with Uganda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania. One of the most terrible “ethnic conflicts” occurred here in 1994, two tribes fought each other within the same territory, the rest of the world bizarrely ignored this event and thousands of people were killed. The event lasted 100 days and almost 1 million people died, even though the Rwanda government asked other countries for military