Rwandan Genocide

Who was murdered? Who were the murders?

• The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass murder of an estimated 800,000 people. Over the course of approximately 100 days from the assassination of Juvenal Habyarimana on April 6 through mid-July, at least 800,000 people were killed, according to a Human Rights Watch estimate. Other estimates of the death toll have ranged between 500,000 and 1,000,000 (a commonly quoted figure is 800,000) or as much as 20% of the country's total population.

Who was murdered? Who were the murders

• The assassination of Habyarimana in April 1994 was the proximate cause of the mass killings of Tutsis and pro-peace Hutus. The mass killings were carried out primarily by two Hutu militias associated with political parties: the Interahamwe and the Impuzamugambi. The genocide was directed by a Hutu power group known as the Akazu. The mass killing also marked the end of the peace agreement meant to end the war, and the Tutsi RPF restarted their offensive, eventually defeating the army and seizing control of the country.

The Murders• Numerous elite Hutu politicians have been found guilty

for the organization of the genocide. The Rwandan Military and Hutu militia groups, notably the Interahamwe, systematically set out to murder all the Tutsis they could capture, irrespective of their age or sex, as well as the political moderates. Hutu civilians were forced to participate in the killings or be shot and were instructed to kill their Tutsi neighbors. Most nations evacuated their nationals from Kigali and abandoned their embassies in the initial stages of the violence.

Aftermath

Approximately two million Hutus, participants in the genocide, and the bystanders, with anticipation of Tutsi retaliation, fled from Rwanda, to Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, and for the most part Zaire. Thousands of them died in epidemics of diseases common to the squalor of refugee camps, such as cholera and dysentery. The United States staged the Operation Support Hope airlift from July to September 1994 to stabilize the situation in the camps.

References:• Des Forges, Alison (1999).

Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch. ISBN 1-56432-171-1. http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/rwanda. Retrieved 2007-01-12.

• See, e.g., Rwanda: How the genocide happened, BBC, April 1, 2004, which gives an estimate of 800,000, and OAU sets inquiry into Rwanda genocide, Africa Recovery, Vol. 12 1#1 (August 1998), page 4, which estimates the number at between 500,000 and 1,000,000. Seven out of every 10 Tutsis were killed.

References continued:

• Transcript of remarks by Mark Doyle in Panel 3: International media coverage of the Genocide of the symposium Media and the Rwandan Genocide held at Carleton University, March 13, 2004

• Ch. 10: "The Rwandan genocide and its aftermath"PDF in State of the World's Refugees 2000, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

• "Operation Support Hope". GlobalSecurity.org. 2005-04-27. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/support_hope.htm. Retrieved 2008-10-02

Women Killers and Child Accomplices

• By September 1995, several hundred of the 10,000 inmates in Kilgali’s central prison were women. Rakiya Omar of the African rights told an Associated Press journalist that some “were actively involved, killing with machetes and guns” while others “acted in support roles allowing murder squads access to hospitals and homes, cheering on male killers, stripping the dead and looting their houses.”

Women Killers and Child Accomplices

• Women killed a few, but mainly waited for Tutsi women crossing the river with a kid on the back, so they would take the kid and throw it in the water.

• Reference: McDowell, “342 Women Implicated in Genocide.”

LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE THAT ARE CRITICAL TO HUMAN DIGNITY, THE RULE OF LAW AND

TOLERANCE

• In 1998, UN Secretary General acknowledged the UN failure:

• "... The world must deeply repent this failure. Rwanda's tragedy was the world's tragedy. All of us who cared about Rwanda, all of us who witnessed its suffering, fervently wish that we could have prevented the genocide. . . Now we know that what we did was not nearly enough--not enough to save Rwanda from itself, not enough to honor the ideals for which the United Nations exists."

LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE THAT ARE CRITICAL TO HUMAN DIGNITY, THE RULE OF LAW AND

TOLERANCE

• Only with demonstrable and principled solidarity with the people of Rwanda can we do some justice to the Day of Reflection in April, and in the process expand the frontiers of human rights rather than undermine its practical ideals and appeals.

• Dr. Amii Omara-Otunnu is the UNESCO Chair in Human Rights and Professor of History, University of Connecticut, USA

LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE THAT ARE CRITICAL TO HUMAN DIGNITY, THE RULE OF LAW AND

TOLERANCE

• With the memory of the genocide in the background, we should extend hands of solidarity and support to the people of Rwanda who are doing their mighty best to scale the odds to fashion a new dawn for the reconciliation and renewal of society in which people can find space to live in peace and harmony.

• Dr. Amii Omara-Otunnu is the UNESCO Chair in Human Rights and Professor of History, University of Connecticut, USA

LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE THAT ARE CRITICAL TO HUMAN DIGNITY, THE RULE OF LAW AND

TOLERANCE

• We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe haven for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide." A quote from President Bill Clinton.

Lessons learned regarding Rwanda from President Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States

• I hope that the international community will continue to learn from our mistakes in Rwanda in 1994. We need to improve our intelligence-gathering capabilities, increase the speed with which international intervention can be undertaken and muster the global political will required to respond to the threat of genocide wherever it may occur.