Genocidal assault of the Hutus against the Tut-sis in Rwanda. In barely 100 days between April and June 1994, some 800,000 Rwandans, out of a total population of just over 8 million, were killed by Hutu militias. Most of the victims were Tutsis, but a significant number were moderate Hutus.
Tensions between the Tutsis and Hutus predated the European colonization of East Africa. The Hutus, the majority population of the highland forests of Rwanda, Burundi, and the eastern Congo, were of medium stature physically and were for the most part engaged in subsistence farming. In the 1300s the Tutsis, cattle herders who were typically taller than the Hutus, began to migrate into the Hutu lands from the north or northeast. Between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, Tutsi kings established hegemony over all of the Hutus. Although the differences between the two peoples have been emphasized for both political and socioeconomic reasons, the Hutus and the Tutsis are quite closely related ethnically, culturally, and linguistically.
In the 1890s Rwanda became part of German East Africa, but in the middle of World War I the colony was seized by Belgian colonials from the Congo, and for the next four decades the colony was administered by the Belgians under a League of Nations and then a U.N. mandate. Lacking any sort of extensive administrative system for managing their colonies, the Belgians found it expedient to control Rwanda through the former Tutsi rulers, compounding the majority Hutus’ sense of disenfranchisement. By the late 1950s as independence loomed, the Hutus had organized several radical political parties. In 1959 the Tutsi king was forced into exile in Uganda. In 1963, the year after Rwanda achieved independence, about 20,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutu rioters, and many Rwandan Tutsis fled to Burundi and other neighboring states. In 1988 about 50,000 Hutus were forced out of Burundi as tensions between the two peoples flared in that country.
By 1990 the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had amassed sufficient strength to invade Rwanda from Uganda. Within three years the RPF made enough gains to force the Hutu government to sign an agreement that guaranteed the Tutsis a substantial voice in Rwandan affairs and an equal place in Rwandan life. This fragile peace was undermined, however, by a carefully orchestrated hate campaign conducted by extremist Hutu groups that controlled Radio Television Libre de Mille Collines (RTLM), the country’s independent radio station. This hate campaign struck all-too-familiar themes: the need for racial purity among the Hutus and the verminlike nature of the "foreign" Tutsis. Although the Hutu-dominated government did not control the Hutu extremists, it clearly did nothing to restrain or discourage them. Then, in April 1994,
Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed when the airplane in which he was traveling with the president of Burundi crashed as it approached the Rwandan capital of Kingali. Almost immediately, claims were made that the airplane had been shot down by a rocket fired by Tutsi forces.
Literally overnight, Habyarimana’s presidential guard initiated an orchestrated slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Kingali and adjacent districts. A militia organization called the Interahamwe (meaning those who attack in unison) had been organized amid the unrest of the preceding years, and it quickly emerged in every corner of the country to greatly expand the slaughter. At its height, the Interahamwe included some 30,000 well-armed militiamen— more than enough to inflame or intimidate large numbers of other Hutus, armed only with clubs, machetes, and knives, into participating in the carnage.
The international community made only token attempts to intercede in order to stop the killing. A small U.N. peacekeeping force was withdrawn after a Hutu mob killed ten of the soldiers. The killing ended only when the RPF, under Paul Kagame, seized control of Kingali and then of the country as a whole. Although a moderate Hutu, Pasteur Bizimungu, was named president of Rwanda, some 2 million Hutus fled into the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, formerly Zaire), which was then on the verge of a violent civil war itself. The Rwandan refugees included many of those who had led the genocide in Rwanda and were wanted for committing crimes against humanity. These war criminals soon seized control of the refugee camps, turning them into fresh killing zones, and they began to recruit, often forcibly, troops with which they launched raids back into Rwanda.
The region and the United Nations thus suddenly faced a double crisis of almost unprecedented proportions. Not only had Rwanda been devastated by a horrible genocide but refugees from Rwanda had flooded into a remote region of a country that was itself politically unstable.
Further complicating matters, the Hutus and Tutsis were the major ethnic groups in districts of the eastern Congo; thus, when Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi interceded in Congolese affairs, there were many layers of complexity in the political, military, and humanitarian situation. The Rwandan military helped to topple the Congolese government of Mobuto Sese Seko and then that of the rebel Laurent Kabila when both failed to control and then disband the Hutu refugee camps in the eastern Congo.
In the decade immediately following the genocide, the Rwandan government and the United Nations made extensive efforts to bring the chief perpetrators to justice. By 2004 some 500 Hutus had been sentenced to death for their parts in the genocide, and about 100,000 were either serving prison sentences or awaiting trial. In that year Paul Kagame won a landslide victory in the first fully democratic presidential election since the genocide, and the RPF won a clear majority in the legislature. The decisiveness of their victory convinced the leaders of the Forces Democratiques de Liberation du Rwanda (FDLR), the major insurgent group among Hutu refugees, to announce that their organization would disband.
Of course, as in all terrible conflicts, many of the victims of the Rwandan genocide were women. But the long-standing ethnic tensions in Rwanda provided especially terrible complications for many Tutsi women. Because the similarities between the Tutsis and Hutus often outweighed their differences, particularly in times of relative peace between the groups, intermarriage was not uncommon. But marriages between Hutu men and Tutsi women were much more common than marriages between Tutsi men and Hutu women. Legally, the offspring of the marriages between Hutu men and Tutsi women were Hutus, but at a time of crisis, when issues of racial purity were used to inflame emotions, the Tutsi women in these marriages and their children were especially vulnerable. Indeed, when the genocide began, Hutu men married to Tutsis were often required to prove their loyalty to the Hutus by participating in the murders of their own wives and children.
More broadly, the propaganda of the Hutu extremists portrayed Tutsi women as scheming and predatory sexual figures who undermined the confidence of Hutu men, literally or figuratively seducing them into an abject submissive-ness. Thus, when the genocide began, Tutsi women were often viciously gang-raped in order to demean them publicly before they were murdered. Moreover, Hutu women, having been culturally conditioned to view Tutsi women as arrogant individuals who flaunted their supposed superiority, made Tutsi women scapegoats for all sorts of perceived injustices and personal grudges. The torture of Tutsi women became a terrible sport for some Hutu women who participated in the genocide. Some Tutsi women were kept in sexual slavery by the Hutu militias even after the exodus to the eastern Congo occurred. Those women who somehow survived their victimization discovered that their own sense of shame was compounded because they were now socially ostracized. They were reminders of their own husbands’ and fathers’ failure to prevent their humiliation. If they had become pregnant as the result of the rapes, the stigma was intensified. Abortion and infanticide became horrible denouements to the genocide.
One interesting footnote to the Rwandan genocide is that two Rwandan women became the first plaintiffs in history to sue the United Nations for its failure to prevent a genocide. Anonciata Kavaruganda, the wife of a murdered Supreme Court justice, and Louise Mushiki-wabo, the only Tutsi in Habyarimana’s cabinet, both claimed that U.N. forces in Rwanda were not just ineffectual but were actually complicit when the killing began.
