Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Education for all!' announced Amani. 'The Batwa came out of the forest to join the one
Rwanda.'
Amani was veiled in how he spoke about it, but he was making a tacit reference to the
event that still, in spite of everything else, defines Rwanda: the genocide of 1994, which
had both put this beautiful country on the world map, and changed its history forever.
Since 1990, Rwanda had been engaged in a bloody civil war. The Hutu-led government
was desperate to suppress the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a rebel organisation largely made
up of refugee Tutsis based across the border in Uganda. Some of these refugees had been
settled in neighbouring countries for a generation, but still considered themselves to have
fled from the country that was rightfully theirs. For three years a war was waged between
the two, until a ceasefire in 1993 seemed to bring an end to hostilities. It was not to last
long. A plan was being prepared that would eventually see a power-sharing government in
place in Kigali, but to many Hutus this felt like a concession too far. Tension was high, and
a delicate balancing act would need to be performed to ensure peace.
It didn't come. All that was needed to trigger something devastating was a smoking gun,
and it came in early 1994. On 6 April, a plane carrying the Hutu premier of Rwanda was
shot down on its approach to Kigali, killing all on board. To prominent Hutus in the armed
forces, this was nothing more than a political assassination. On the very next day, the gen-
ocide began in Kigali and spread rapidly outwards to consume the whole of Rwanda. Sol-
diers and police quickly executed prominent Tutsis in the capital and, within hours, roadb-
locks had been established to contain refugees. Systematically, the Hutu police and militias
swept Kigali and, checking the documentation of every citizen to ensure ethnicity, began a
genocide that would go on to claim an estimated one million lives.
Perhaps the most terrifying thing was that Hutu civilians were later pressurised to take
up their own guns and machetes and join in the slaughter. So it was that Hutus turned on
Tutsis across the country, and Rwanda was defined forever as a place of genocide. The
killings lasted a hundred days, brought to an end only by the mobilisation of the RPF
across the border and a military campaign that moved south, from Uganda, capturing first
the north of the country and, finally, Kigali itself. We would reach Kigali in about a week's
time, if the walking was good, crossing the killing fields to reach the centre of the tragedy
itself.
I looked at Amani. He was still talking, but I was thinking less about the Batwa and
their village than Amani himself. He was, I knew, a Tutsi by ancestry. I wondered what his
experience of those hundred days had been like, how many friends and family members
he had lost, what it now felt like to be living in a country carrying those fresh scars. Those
were all questions Rwanda itself was trying to answer every day.
'Since 1994, we do not have ethnicity. All Rwandans have the same language, the same
history, the same culture. There is only one ethnic group - the Banyarwanda. We are all
