The Rwandan genocide is one of the most shocking and remembered events in human history when approximately 800,000 people died. Their population in 1994 was composed of 7 million people with three ethnic groups; the Hutus with 85% occupying the majority of the population, the Tutsi with 14% the minority,...
The Rwandan genocide is one of the most shocking and remembered events in human history when approximately 800,000 people died. Their population in 1994 was composed of 7 million people with three ethnic groups; the Hutus with 85% occupying the majority of the population, the Tutsi with 14% the minority, and finally the Twa with only 1%. During April and July, the government started to kill the Tutsi minority and anyone who opposed the government laws due to a Hute extremist. These two ethnicities have always had some conflicts but it was not until the colonial period that the leading Belgians treated the Tutsis in a better way, giving them more privileges and rights over the Hutus, causing that later all the population had to carry with themselves an identity car that classified them with their ethnicity group.
In 1959 approximately 300,000 left Rwanda because of a Hutu revolution causing their population to decrease even more. During 1962, the year when Rwanda got independent from Belgium, political parties related to the Hutu majority ruled the country leading to violent treatment and also discrimination towards the Tutsis, so they left Rwanda, the reason why by the mid-1960 half of its population lived outside Rwanda and the Hute extremists blamed them for the country’s increasing economic, political and social pressures. In 1990 the Rwandan Patriot Front (RPF) invaded Rwanda starting the civil war between these two ethnicities, the Tutsis were incriminated by Hutus extremists for helping foreign rebels operate.
During all of this, a group of Hutu leaders was making a list of Tustis in secret, also they were arming youth militias who made small-scale massacres, all of this was documented by national and international human rights organizations including an envoy of the UN Commission of Human Rights. The killings were unmeasurable and impulsive, nobody was punished for their crimes and the violence was catalogued as an internal conflict by international entities.
The Arusha Accords agreement was signed finally ending the civil war, Hutu extremists did not agree on its terms which caused future violence, here is where radio RTL (private Hutu radio station), got involved when they started to spread hate messages towards the Tutsis requesting people to kill them by saying “weed out the coaches”, including names of people to be killed, then Hutu political leader started to distribute weapons as machetes to the militias that were with them.
Everything was fine with the peace agreement but it was broken when on April 6 of 1994 a plane carrying the Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down killing everyone on board, this was the cause of a major conflict between these two ethnicities due that the Hutu extremists blamed the RPF for this and they used it as an excuse for carrying out the genocide, even though the RPF said it was all a trap to blame them and then kill them.
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