The Political And Media Views On The Genocide

This investigation studies two of the causes of the 1994 genocide of Rwanda. The two causes are examined in order to see to what extent each contributed to the genocide. The social and ethnic conflicts between two Rwandan groups called the Hutus and the Tutsis caused violent disputes and riots. The assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana is often thought of as the event that sparked the mass murders. Did the assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana influence the Rwandan genocide of 1994 more than the ongoing social and ethnic conflicts?

Throughout the 20th century, numerous acts of genocides have attempted to bring the complete elimination and devastation of large groups of people originating from various particular ethnicities. With these genocides occurring in many regions of the world, the perpetrators often organizing such crimes, have historically been larger and more powerful than the victims themselves. Often being the government and its military forces. However, the lack of international response associated with these genocides, further contributed to the devastating outcomes. On April 6,1994, the fastest killing spree of the century took place in Rwanda against the Tutsi minority population. With many warning signs having already been proclaimed prior to the start of the Rwandan genocide, I believe that with international interference, this bloodshed could have ultimately been prevented.

William Hogan Research Paper Plan Title: Parallels between Holocaust and Rwandan Genocides Background Argument Counter Argument Rebuttal Conclusion Thesis: Genocide is important to understand so we can help prevent future violence on humanity. Political, cultural, economic, and ethnicity differences led to terrible modern day genocides in Rwanda and during the Holocaust. Parallels between the Holocaust and Rwandan genocides can be drawn from the role the state played in mobilizing, organizing, and allowing genocide to take place. 1st: 3-4 pages: synthesize and analyze research and give examples of genocide general, understanding, health, and Holocaust/Rwanda comparisons/differences.

In 1994 a senseless massacre of hatred arose from beneath the cracks of a country in ruins. Two main groups involved were the Hutu and the Tutsi both of which were ethnic tribes of Rwanda. The genocide was caused by political tension This genocide was building up its stages in the 1960s when most of Rwanda’s Tutsi population fled the country because of the Hutu gaining power. But what really erupted the violence was when a plane carrying Habyarimana and Burundi’s president Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down over Kigali there were no survivors. The people who shot the plane down were never found but didn’t realize they had just created one on humanity's biggest senseless bloodshed [The Rwandan Genocide].

The Rwandan genocide is a grim reminder of how the world failed to protect hundreds of thousands of civilians. The conflict between the Hutu’s and Tutsi’s resulted in the massacre of 800,000 Tutsi’s in 100 days. Following the Second World War, the UN was created to constitute the obligation to protect; it is an attempt at a mutual effort to encourage international peace. How could the world allow such an atrocity to transpire without any retribution from anyone? The media undoubtedly functioned as an essential factor to the world for not understanding exactly what was developing in Rwanda. There was an ignorant notion of turning away from the atrocity because it was “far away”. The Clinton Administration was in charge during this conflict and

It is almost too easy to think of the Rwandan Genocide as something out of a fictional horror film, in that it almost doesn’t seem possible such atrocities could have actually occurred. Only at the cinema could murdering and dismembering the bodies of perfectly innocent citizens, many of them children, be imaginable. The story of the Rwandan Genocide is one of a great divide between the Hutu and Tutsi people. However, there was no real reason for this division to come to fruition. They didn’t have religious disagreements, as in the Armenian Genocide, nor were they born into an environment with extreme ethnic tensions. European colonialism in the Rwandan region ultimately created the “ethnic” divide between the Hutu and and Tutsi groups

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

We have seen that the key question to understand the conflict in Rwanda is to remember that both Hutus and Tutsis are political identities imposed by the state. During 1994 some were killed because they 'looked like Tutsis' and others killed because 'they thought they would probably be Hutus'. Conflicts such as those in Rwanda, which result from the weakening of state power, which is responsible for preserving laws and guaranteeing justice, occur in the midst of failed states. This situation is the perfect incubator of generalized internal violence, both prior to conflicts and during and after them. It is in events like these where international humanitarian law plays a preponderant role. However, there are no safe ways to

The author shows how catastrophic the killings were by comparing it to other murders experienced in the past. It is evident that it was difficult to find the Tutsis who were alive unlike the dead. Even though, Rwanda’s killings were less compared to Cambodia’s, the former was genocide because it was planned while the later seemed amateurish. Furthermore, Yugoslavia’s was similar to a riot. Rwanda’s dead also accumulated around three times the Jewish Holocaust rate (Gourevitch, 1995). The article further illustrates how worse it is when one community massively kills fellow men. The perpetrators will soon appear before Rwanda’s Tribunal court for judgment. Overall, the article was informative as it addressed the genocide concept using Rwanda as illustration for better

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 effects of the genocide are felt throughout Rwandan public policy as the current government is composed of many individuals responsible for ending the massacres. The genocide’s ripple effects are felt in all aspects of the nations including its foreign policy. This thesis attempts to explain how historical experiences coupled through the themes of abandonment, self-reliance and the promotion of security along with interpretations by government officials of how international order operates shapes how the Rwandan government interacts with the global community. This is not a new endeavour as many others write on aspects of Rwanda’s commitments whether on a positive issue such as high utilisation of foreign aid for economic, social and governance development or negative like the genocide guilt

“The Tutsis are collaborators with the Belgian colonists. They stole our land. They whipped us. Now they have come back, these Tutsi rebels. They are murderers. They are cockroaches. Rwanda is our Hutu Land. We must squash the infestation. This is RTLM, Hutu Power Radio. Stay Alert. Watch your neighbors. (Hotel Rwanda).” This is a part of one of the broadcasts Radio Télévision des Milles Collines (RTLM) used to transmit hate propaganda to the state of Rwanda. From October 1993 to late 1994, the RTLM advanced fearmongering ethnic distinctions and misinformation to maintain the climate of fear during the genocide; it defined the Tutsis as enemies and distorted the line between the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) and domestic Tutsis. Essentially, the RTLM was a facilitator of genocide; it was able to create a dehumanizing discourse - a discourse that procured Hutu participation in the mass killings and provided the legitimacy for Hutu perpetrators to kill the Tutsis and moderate Hutus. But the RTLM not only mobilized the Hutu in an organized and coordinated campaign against the Tutsis, it also mobilizes the conversation about the role media plays in and against any large scale massacre.

At the core within the study of Rwanda, whether in terms of its people or its government’s public policy, are the continual affects of the 1994 genocide (also referred to as the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi). The genocide’s effects can be seen within the context of the nation’s foreign policy. Its study becomes problematic as the genocide’s role within the nation's international relations is misunderstood. For much of the last two decades, scholars interpret Rwanda’s foreign affairs in terms of the utilisation of the genocide guilt card. This concept defines Rwandan foreign policy in terms of guilting the international community for state interests. The effectiveness of the guilt stems from the shame by global states for not intervening

A large number of Rwandans could not read or write and, as a result, radio was an important way for the government to deliver messages to the population. In March 1992, Radio in Rwanda was first used in directly promoting the killing of Tutsi and as a disseminating source of propaganda. The media often relied heavily on half-truths and sometimes-outright lies and threats to define who the enemy was and why retaliation should proceed. This failure on the part of party officials and media to stem the progress into the abyss contributed significantly to fuelling a climate of intolerance and turned them into agents of destruction of Rwandan society. (Sibomana 1999: 49). The Western media thus has the power to ‘transform a crisis from one that is at micro level hardly noted by decision-makers, to one that is at macro level and receiving higher priority’(Auerbach and Bloch-Elkon 2005: 16). As embodied within the Rwandan Genocides, political events are representative of contemporary global politics, and belong to a precise history of colonialism. (Mamdani, 2002, 498). ‘Contained within the fabrication and procreation of global politics is the interpretation of what the genocide might mean’ (Evans, 1999, 3). Naturalizing the Western ideal of sovereignty is the concept of ‘failed’ or ‘failing’ states and the separation between that which is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. This

This paper is an overview for the movie Hotel Rwanda. The movie is set in 1994 which reflects the situation in Kigali, Rwanda where the genocide occurred between people with different tribes. The film by George Terry also shows whether the role played by the international organization which is United Nations (UN) is effective in order to control the conflict that has killed a lot of people and the concern of the world about the incident.