Rwanda: How the genocide happened • 17 May 2011 BBC news

Image copyright AFPImage caption Some 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda's genocide in just 100 days

Between April and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days.

Most of the dead were Tutsis - and most of those who perpetrated the violence were Hutus.

Even for a country with such a turbulent history as Rwanda, the scale and speed of the slaughter left its people reeling.

The genocide was sparked by the death of the Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, when his plane was shot down above Kigali airport on 6 April 1994.

A French judge has blamed current Rwandan President, Paul Kagame - at the time the leader of a Tutsi rebel group - and some of his close associates for carrying out the rocket attack.

Mr Kagame vehemently denies this and says it was the work of Hutu extremists, in order to provide a pretext to carry out their well-laid plans to exterminate the Tutsi community.

Whoever was responsible, within hours a campaign of violence spread from the capital throughout the country, and did not subside until three months later.

But the death of the president was by no means the only cause of Africa's largest genocide in modern times.

History of violence

Ethnic tension in Rwanda is nothing new. There have always been disagreements between the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis, but the animosity between them has grown substantially since the colonial period.

The two ethnic groups are actually very similar - they speak the same language, inhabit the same areas and follow the same traditions.

However, Tutsis are often taller and thinner than Hutus, with some saying their origins lie in Ethiopia.

During the genocide, the bodies of Tutsis were thrown into rivers, with their killers saying they were being sent back to Ethiopia.

When the Belgian colonists arrived in 1916, they produced identity cards classifying people according to their ethnicity.

1994: RWANDA'S GENOCIDE

▪ 6 April: President Habyarimana killed in plane explosion

▪ April - July: Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus killed

▪ July: Tutsi-led rebel movement RPF captures the capital Kigali

▪ July: Two million Hutus flee to Zaire, now DR Congo Q&A: Search for justice

The Belgians considered the Tutsis to be superior to the Hutus. Not surprisingly, the Tutsis welcomed this idea, and for the next 20 years they enjoyed better jobs and educational opportunities than their neighbours.

Resentment among the Hutus gradually built up, culminating in a series of riots in 1959. More than 20,000 Tutsis were killed, and many more fled to the neighbouring countries of Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda.

When Belgium relinquished power and granted Rwanda independence in 1962, the Hutus took their place. Over subsequent decades, the Tutsis were portrayed as the scapegoats for every crisis.

Building up to genocide

This was still the case in the years before the genocide. The economic situation worsened and the incumbent president, Juvenal Habyarimana, began losing popularity.

At the same time, Tutsi refugees in Uganda - supported by some moderate Hutus - were forming the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), led by Mr Kagame. Their aim was to overthrow Habyarimana and secure their right to return to their homeland.

Habyarimana chose to exploit this threat as a way to bring dissident Hutus back to his side, and Tutsis inside Rwanda were accused of being RPF collaborators.

In August 1993, after several attacks and months of negotiation, a peace accord was signed between Habyarimana and the RPF, but it did little to stop the continued unrest.

When Habyarimana's plane was shot down at the beginning of April 1994, it was the final nail in the coffin.

Exactly who killed the president - and with him the president of Burundi and many chief members of staff - has not been established.

Whoever was behind the killing its effect was both instantaneous and catastrophic.

Mass murder

In Kigali, the presidential guard immediately initiated a campaign of retribution. Leaders of the political opposition were murdered, and almost immediately, the slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus began.

Within hours, recruits were dispatched all over the country to carry out a wave of slaughter.

Image copyrightAFP Image caption Boys were among those recruited into militia groups

The early organisers included military officials, politicians and businessmen, but soon many others joined in the mayhem.

Organised gangs of government soldiers and militias hacked their way through the Tutsi population with machetes, or blew them up in churches where they had taken refuge.

The extremist ethnic Hutu regime in office in 1994 appeared genuinely to believe that the only way it could hang on to power was by wiping out the ethnic Tutsis completely.

Encouraged by the presidential guard and radio propaganda, an unofficial militia group called the Interahamwe (meaning those who attack together) was mobilised. At its peak, this group was 30,000-strong.

Soldiers and police officers encouraged ordinary citizens to take part. In some cases, Hutu civilians were forced to murder their Tutsi neighbours by military personnel.

Participants were often given incentives, such as money or food, and some were even told they could appropriate the land of the Tutsis they killed.

On the ground at least, the Rwandans were largely left alone by the international community. Most of the UN troops withdrew after the murder of 10 soldiers.

The day after Habyarimana's death, the RPF renewed their assault on government forces, and numerous attempts by the UN to negotiate a ceasefire came to nothing.

Aftermath

Finally, in July, the RPF captured Kigali. The government collapsed and the RPF declared a ceasefire.As soon as it became apparent that the RPF was victorious, an estimated two million Hutus fled to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).These refugees include many who have since been implicated in the massacres.At first, a multi-ethnic government was set up, with a Hutu, Pasteur Bizimungu as president and Mr Kagame as his deputy.But the pair later fell out and Bizimungu was jailed on charges of inciting ethnic violence, while Mr Kagame became president.Although the killing in Rwanda was over, the presence of Hutu militias in DR Congo has led to years of conflict there, causing up to five million deaths.Rwanda's now Tutsi-led government has twice invaded its much larger neighbour, saying it wants to wipe out the Hutu forces.And a Congolese Tutsi rebel group remains active, refusing to lay down arms, saying otherwise its community would be at risk of genocide. The world's largest peacekeeping force has been unable to end the fighting.

America’s Secret role in the Rwandan genocide The violence that shocked the world in 1994 did not come from nowhere. While the CIA looked on, its allies in the Ugandan government helped to spread terror and fuel ethnic hatred by Helen C Epstein The Guardian Newspaper

Tue 12 Sep 2017 01.00 EDT Last modified on Fri 5 Jan 2018 06.52 EST

Between April and July 1994, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were murdered in the most rapid genocide ever recorded. The killers used simple tools – machetes, clubs and other blunt objects, or herded people into buildings and set them aflame with kerosene. Most of the victims were of minority Tutsi ethnicity; most of the killers belonged to the majority Hutus.

The Rwanda genocide has been compared to the Nazi Holocaust in its surreal brutality. But there is a fundamental difference between these two atrocities. No Jewish army posed a threat to Germany. Hitler targeted the Jews and other weak groups solely because of his own demented beliefs and the prevailing prejudices of the time. The Rwandan Hutu génocidaires, as the people who killed during the genocide were known, were also motivated by irrational beliefs and prejudices, but the powder keg contained another important ingredient: terror. Three and a half years before the genocide, a rebel army of mainly Rwandan Tutsi exiles known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front, or RPF, had invaded Rwanda and set up camps in the northern mountains. They had been armed and trained by neighbouring Uganda, which continued to supply them throughout the ensuing civil war, in violation of the UN charter, Organisation of African Unity rules, various Rwandan ceasefire and peace agreements, and the repeated promises of the Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni.

During this period, officials at the US embassy in Kampala knew that weapons were crossing the border, and the CIA knew that the rebels’ growing military strength was escalating ethnic tensions within Rwanda to such a degree that hundreds of thousands of Rwandans might die in widespread ethnic violence. However, Washington not only ignored Uganda’s assistance to the Rwandan rebels, it also ramped up military and development aid to Museveni and then hailed him as a peacemaker once the genocide was underway.

The hatred the Hutu génocidaires unleashed represents the worst that human beings are capable of, but in considering what led to this disaster, it is important to bear in mind that the violence was not spontaneous. It emerged from a century or more of injustice and brutality on both sides, and although the génocidaires struck back against innocents, they were provoked by heavily armed rebels supplied by Uganda, while the US looked on.

The RPF rebel army represented Tutsi refugees who had fled their country in the early 1960s. For centuries before that, they had formed an elite minority caste in Rwanda. In a system continued under Belgian colonialism, they treated the Hutu peasants like serfs, forcing them to work on their land and sometimes beating them like donkeys. Hutu anger simmered until shortly before independence in 1962, then exploded in brutal pogroms against the Tutsi, hundreds of thousands of whom fled to neighbouring countries.

In Uganda, a new generation of Tutsi refugees grew up, but they soon became embroiled in the lethal politics of their adoptive country. Some formed alliances with Ugandan Tutsis and the closely related Hima – Museveni’s tribe – many of whom were opposition supporters and therefore seen as enemies by then-president Milton Obote, who ruled Uganda in the 1960s and again in the early 1980s.

After Idi Amin overthrew Obote in 1971, many Rwandan Tutsis moved out of the border refugee camps. Some tended the cattle of wealthy Ugandans; others acquired property and began farming; some married into Ugandan families; and a small number joined the State Research Bureau, Amin’s dreaded security apparatus, which inflicted terror on Ugandans. When Obote returned to power in the 1980s, he stripped the Rwandan Tutsis of their civil rights and ordered them into the refugee camps or back over the border into Rwanda, where they were not welcomed by the Hutu-dominated government. Those who refused to go were assaulted, raped and killed and their houses were destroyed.

In response to Obote’s abuses, more and more Rwandan refugees joined the National Resistance Army, an anti-Obote rebel group founded by Museveni in 1981. When Museveni’s rebels took power in 1986, a quarter of them were Rwandan Tutsi refugees, and Museveni granted them high ranks in Uganda’s new army.

Museveni’s promotion of the Rwandan refugees within the army generated not only resentment within Uganda, but terror within Rwanda where the majority Hutus had long feared an onslaught from Tutsi refugees. In 1972, some 75,000 educated Hutus – just about anyone who could read – had been massacred in Tutsi-ruled Burundi, a small country neighbouring Rwanda with a similar ethnic makeup. During the 1960s, Uganda’s Tutsi refugees had launched occasional armed strikes across the border, but Rwanda’s army easily fought them off. Each attack sparked reprisals against those Tutsis who remained inside Rwanda – many of whom were rounded up, tortured and killed – on mere suspicion of being supporters of the refugee fighters. By the late 1980s, a new generation of refugees, with training and weapons supplied by Museveni’s Uganda, represented a potentially far greater threat. According to the historian André Guichaoua, anger and fear hung over every bar-room altercation, every office dispute and every church sermon.

By the time Museveni took power, the plight of the Tutsi refugees had come to the attention of the west, which began pressuring Rwanda’s government to allow them to return. At first, Rwanda’s president, Juvénal Habyarimana, refused, protesting that Rwanda was among the most densely populated countries in the world, and its people, dependent upon peasant agriculture, needed land to survive. The population had grown since the refugees left, and Rwanda was now full, Habyarimana claimed.

Although he did not say so publicly, overpopulation almost certainly was not Habyarimana’s major concern. He knew the refugees’ leaders were not just interested in a few plots of land and some hoes. The RPF’s professed aim was refugee rights, but its true aim was an open secret throughout the Great Lakes region of Africa: to overthrow Habyarimana’s government and take over Rwanda by force. Museveni had even informed the Rwandan president that the Tutsi exiles might invade, and Habyarimana had also told US state department officials that he feared an invasion from Uganda.

One afternoon in early 1988 when the news was slow, Kiwanuka Lawrence Nsereko, a journalist with the Citizen, an independent Ugandan newspaper, stopped by to see an old friend at the ministry of transport in downtown Kampala. Two senior army officers, whom Lawrence knew, happened to be in the waiting room when he arrived. Like many of Museveni’s officers, they were Rwandan Tutsi refugees. After some polite preliminaries, Lawrence asked the men what they were doing there.

Pictures of the victims of the genocide, donated by survivors, inside the Gisozi memorial in Kigali, Rwanda. Photograph: Radu Sigheti/Reuters

“We want some of our people to be in Rwanda,” one of them replied. Lawrence shuddered. He had grown up among Hutus who had fled Tutsi oppression in Rwanda before independence in 1962, as well as Tutsis who had fled the Hutu-led pogroms that followed it. Lawrence’s childhood catechist had been a Tutsi; the Hutus who worked in his family’s gardens wouldn’t attend his lessons. Instead, they swapped fantastic tales about how Tutsis once used their Hutu slaves as spittoons, expectorating into their mouths, instead of on the ground.

The officers went in to speak to the transport official first, and when Lawrence’s turn came, he asked his friend what had transpired. The official was elated. The Rwandans had come to express their support for a new open borders

programme, he said. Soon Rwandans living in Uganda would be allowed to cross over and visit their relatives without a visa. This would help solve the vexing refugee issue, he explained.

Lawrence was less sanguine. He suspected the Rwandans might use the open borders programme to conduct surveillance for an invasion, or even carry out attacks inside Rwanda. A few days later, he dropped in on a Rwandan Tutsi colonel in Uganda’s army, named Stephen Ndugute.

“We are going back to Rwanda,” the colonel said. (When the RPF eventually took over Rwanda in 1994, Ndugute would be second in command.)

Many Ugandans were eager to see Museveni’s Rwandan officers depart. They were not only occupying senior army positions many Ugandans felt should be held by Ugandans, but some were also notorious for their brutality. Paul Kagame, who went on to lead the RPF takeover of Rwanda and has ruled Rwanda since the genocide, was acting chief of military intelligence, in whose headquarters Lawrence himself had been tortured. In northern and eastern Uganda, where a harsh counterinsurgency campaign was underway, some of the army’s worst abuses had been committed by Rwandan Tutsi officers. In 1989, for example, soldiers under the command of Chris Bunyenyezi, also an RPF leader, herded scores of suspected rebels in the village of Mukura into an empty railway wagon with no ventilation, locked the doors and allowed them to die of suffocation.

Lawrence had little doubt that if war broke out in Rwanda, it was going to be “very, very bloody”, he told me. He decided to alert Rwanda’s president. Habyarimana agreed to meet him during a state visit to Tanzania. At a hotel in Dar es Salaam, the 20-year-old journalist warned the Rwandan leader about the dangers of the open border programme. “Don’t worry,” Lawrence says Habyarimana told him. “Museveni is my friend and would never allow the RPF to invade.”

Habyarimana was bluffing. The open border programme was actually part of his own ruthless counter-strategy. Every person inside Rwanda visited by a Tutsi refugee would be followed by state agents and automatically branded an RPF sympathiser; many were arrested, tortured, and killed by Rwandan government operatives. The Tutsis inside Rwanda thus became pawns in a power struggle between the RPF exiles and Habyarimana’s government. Five years later, they would be crushed altogether in one of the worst genocides ever recorded.

On the morning of 1 October 1990, thousands of RPF fighters gathered in a football stadium in western Uganda about 20 miles from the Rwandan border. Some were Rwandan Tutsi deserters from Uganda’s army; others were volunteers from the refugee camps. Two nearby hospitals were readied for casualties. When locals asked what was going on, Fred Rwigyema, who was both a Ugandan army commander and the leader of the RPF, said they were preparing for Uganda’s upcoming Independence Day celebrations, but some excited rebels let the true purpose of their mission leak out. They crossed into Rwanda that afternoon. The Rwandan army, with help from French and Zairean commandos, stopped their advance and the rebels retreated back into Uganda. A short time later, they invaded again and eventually established bases in northern Rwanda’s Virunga mountains.

Presidents Museveni and Habyarimana were attending a Unicef conference in New York at the time. They were staying in the same hotel and Museveni rang Habyarimana’s room at 5am to say he had just learned that 14 of his Rwandan Tutsi officers had deserted and crossed into Rwanda. “I would like to make it very clear,” the Ugandan president reportedly said, “that we did not know about the desertion of these boys” – meaning the Rwandans, not 14, but thousands of whom had just invaded Habyarimana’s country – “nor do we support it.”

Tutsi rebels near Kigali during the civil war in Rwanda. Photograph: Patrick Robert/Corbis/Sygma via Getty Images

In Washington a few days later, Museveni told the State Department’s Africa chief, Herman Cohen, that he would court martial the Rwandan deserters if they attempted to cross back into Uganda. But a few days after that, he quietly requested France and Belgium not to assist the Rwandan government in repelling the invasion. Cohen writes that he now believes that Museveni must have been feigning shock, when he knew what was going on all along.

When Museveni returned to Uganda, Robert Gribbin, then deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Kampala, had some “stiff talking points” for him. Stop the invasion at once, the American said, and ensure no support flowed to the RPF from Uganda.

Museveni had already issued a statement promising to seal all Uganda–Rwanda border crossings, provide no assistance to the RPF and arrest any rebels who tried to return to Uganda. But he proceeded to do none of those things and the Americans appear to have made no objection.

When the RPF launched its invasion, Kagame, then a senior officer in both the Ugandan army and the RPF, was in Kansas at the United States Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, studying field tactics and psyops, propaganda techniques to win hearts and minds. But after four RPF commanders were killed, he told his American instructors that he was dropping out to join the Rwandan invasion. The Americans apparently supported this decision and Kagame flew into Entebbe airport, travelled to the Rwandan border by road, and crossed over to take command of the rebels.

For the next three and a half years, the Ugandan army continued to supply Kagame’s fighters with provisions and weapons, and allow his soldiers free passage back and forth across the border. In 1991, Habyarimana accused Museveni of allowing the RPF to attack Rwanda from protected bases on Ugandan territory. When a Ugandan journalist published an article in the government-owned New Vision newspaper revealing the existence of these bases, Museveni threatened to charge the journalist and his editor with sedition. The entire border area was cordoned off. Even a French and Italian military inspection team was denied access.

In October 1993, the UN security council authorised a peacekeeping force to ensure no weapons crossed the border. The peacekeepers’ commander, Canadian Lt-Gen Roméo Dallaire, spent most of his time inside Rwanda, but he also visited the Ugandan border town of Kabale, where an officer told him that his inspectors would have to provide the Ugandan army with 12 hours’ notice so that escorts could be arranged to accompany them on their border patrols. Dallaire protested: the element of surprise is crucial for such monitoring missions. But the Ugandans insisted and eventually, Dallaire, who was much more concerned about developments inside Rwanda, gave up.

The border was a sieve anyway, as Dallaire later wrote. There were five official crossing sites and countless unmapped mountain trails. It was impossible to monitor. Dallaire had also heard that an arsenal in Mbarara, a Ugandan town about 80 miles from the Rwanda border, was being used to supply the RPF. The Ugandans refused to allow Dallaire’s peacekeepers to inspect that. In 2004, Dallaire told a US congressional hearing that Museveni had laughed in his face when they met at a gathering to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the genocide. “I remember that UN mission on the border,” Museveni reportedly told him. “We manoeuvred ways to get around it, and of course we did support the [RPF].”

US officials knew that Museveni was not honouring his promise to court martial RPF leaders. The US was monitoring Ugandan weapons shipments to the RPF in 1992, but instead of punishing Museveni, western donors including the US doubled aid to his government and allowed his defence spending to balloon to 48% of Uganda’s budget, compared with 13% for education and 5% for health, even as Aids was ravaging the country. In 1991, Uganda purchased 10 times more US weapons than in the preceding 40 years combined.

The 1990 Rwanda invasion, and the US’s tacit support for it, is all the more disturbing because in the months before it occurred, Habyarimana had acceded to many of the international community’s demands, including for the return of refugees and a multiparty democratic system. So it wasn’t clear what the RPF was fighting for. Certainly, negotiations over refugee repatriation would have dragged on and might not have been resolved to the RPF’s satisfaction, or at all. But negotiations appear to have been abandoned abruptly in favour of war.

At least one American was concerned about this. The US ambassador to Rwanda, Robert Flaten, saw with his own eyes that the RPF invasion had caused terror in Rwanda. After the invasion, hundreds of thousands of mostly Hutu

villagers fled RPF-held areas, saying they had seen abductions and killings. Flaten urged the George HW Bush’s administration to impose sanctions on Uganda, as it had on Iraq after the Kuwait invasion earlier that year. But unlike Saddam Hussein, who was routed from Kuwait, Museveni received only Gribbin’s “stiff questions” about the RPF’s invasion of Rwanda.

“In short,” Gribbin writes, “we said that the cat was out of the bag, and neither the United States nor Uganda was going to rebag it.” Sanctioning Museveni might have harmed US interests in Uganda, he explains. “We sought a stable nation after years of violence and uncertainty. We encouraged nascent democratic initiatives. We supported a full range of economic reforms.”

A memorial to the more than 11,000 Tutsi men, women and children murdered at Kibuye. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

But the US was not fostering nascent democratic initiatives inside Uganda. While pressuring other countries, including Rwanda, to open up political space, Uganda’s donors were allowing Museveni to ban political party activity, arrest journalists and editors, and conduct brutal counterinsurgency operations in which civilians were tortured and killed. And far from seeking stability, the US, by allowing Uganda to arm the RPF, was setting the stage for what would turn out to be the worst outbreak of violence ever recorded on the African continent. Years later, Cohen expressed regret for failing to pressure Uganda to stop supporting the RPF, but by then it was far too late.

For Habyarimana and his circle of Hutu elites, the RPF invasion seemed to have a silver lining, at least at first. At the time, Hutu/Tutsi relations inside Rwanda had improved. Habyarimana had sought reconciliation with the Tutsis still living in Rwanda by reserving civil service jobs and university places for them in proportion to their share of the population. This programme was modestly successful, and the greatest tensions in the country now lay along class, not ethnic, lines. A tiny educated Hutu clique linked to Habyarimana’s family who called themselves évolués –the evolved ones – was living off the labour of millions of impoverished rural Hutus, whom they exploited just as brutally as the Tutsi overlords of bygone days.

The évolués subjected the peasants to forced labour and fattened themselves on World Bank “anti-poverty” projects that provided jobs and other perks for their own group, but did little to alleviate poverty. International aid donors had pressured Habyarimana to allow opposition political parties to operate, and many new ones had sprung up. Hutus and Tutsis were increasingly united in criticising Habyarimana’s autocratic behaviour and nepotism, and the vast economic inequalities in the country.

When Rwanda’s ethnic bonfires roared back to life in the days after the RPF invasion, Habyarimana and his circle seem to have sensed a political opportunity: now they could distract the disaffected Hutu masses from their own abuses by reawakening fears of the “demon Tutsis”, who would soon become convenient scapegoats to divert attention from profound socioeconomic injustices.

Shortly after the invasion, all Tutsis – whether RPF supporters or not – became targets of a vicious propaganda campaign that would bear hideous fruit in April 1994. Chauvinist Hutu newspapers, magazines and radio programmes began reminding Hutu audiences that they were the original occupants of the Great Lakes region and that Tutsis were Nilotics – supposedly warlike pastoralists from Ethiopia who had conquered and enslaved them in the 17th century. The RPF invasion was nothing more than a plot by Museveni, Kagame and their Tutsi co-conspirators to re-establish this evil Nilotic empire. Cartoons of Tutsis killing Hutus began appearing in magazines,

along with warnings that all Tutsis were RPF spies bent on dragging the country back to the days when the Tutsi queen supposedly rose from her seat supported by swords driven between the shoulders of Hutu children. In December 1993, a picture of a machete appeared on the front page of a Hutu publication under the headline “What to do about the Tutsis?”

Habyarimana knew that the RPF, thanks to Ugandan backing, was better armed, trained and disciplined than his own army. Under immense international pressure, he had agreed in August 1993 to grant the RPF seats in a transitional government and nearly half of all posts in the army. Even Tutsis inside Rwanda were against giving the RPF so much power because they knew it could provoke the angry, fearful Hutus even more, and they were right. As Habyarimana’s increasingly weak government reluctantly acceded to the RPF’s demands for power, Hutu extremist mayors and other local officials began stockpiling rifles, and government-linked anti-Tutsi militia groups began distributing machetes and kerosene to prospective génocidaires. In January 1994, four months before the genocide, the CIA predicted that if tensions were not somehow defused, hundreds of thousands of people would die in ethnic violence. The powder keg awaited a spark to set it off.

That spark arrived at about 8pm on 6 April 1994, when rockets fired from positions close to Kigali airport shot down Habyarimana’s plane as it was preparing to land. The next morning, frantic Hutu militia groups, convinced that the Nilotic apocalypse was at hand, launched a ferocious attack against their Tutsi neighbours.

Few subjects are more polarising than the modern history of Rwanda. Questions such as “Has the RPF committed human rights abuses?” or “Who shot down President Habyarimana’s plane?” have been known to trigger riots at academic conferences. The Rwandan government bans and expels critical scholars from the country, labelling them “enemies of Rwanda” and “genocide deniers”, and Kagame has stated that he doesn’t think that “anyone in the media, UN [or] human rights organisations has any moral right whatsoever to level any accusations against me or Rwanda”.

Be that as it may, several lines of evidence suggest that the RPF was responsible for the downing of Habyarimana’s plane. The missiles used were Russian-made SA-16s. The Rwandan army was not known to possess these weapons, but the RPF had them at least since May 1991. Two SA-16 single-use launchers were also found in a valley near Masaka Hill, an area within range of the airport that was accessible to the RPF. According to the Russian military prosecutor’s office, the launchers had been sold to Uganda by the USSR in 1987.

Since 1997, five additional investigations of the crash have been carried out, including one by a UN-appointed team, and one each by French and Spanish judges working independently. These three concluded that the RPF was probably responsible. Two Rwandan government investigations conversely concluded that Hutu elites and members of Habyarimana’s own army were responsible.

A 2012 report on the crash commissioned by two French judges supposedly exonerated the RPF. But this report, although widely publicised as definitive, actually was not. The authors used ballistic and acoustic evidence to argue that the missiles were probably fired by the Rwandan army from Kanombe military barracks. But they admit that their technical findings could not exclude the possibility that the missiles were fired from Masaka Hill, where the launchers were found. The report also fails to explain how the Rwandan army, which was not known to possess SA-16s, could have shot down the plane using them.

Soon after the plane crash, the génocidaires began their attack against the Tutsis, and the RPF began advancing. But the rebels’ troop movements suggested that their primary priority was conquering the country, not saving Tutsi civilians. Rather than heading south, where most of the killings were taking place, the RPF circled around Kigali. By the time it reached the capital weeks later, most of the Tutsis there were dead.

When the UN peacekeeper Dallaire met RPF commander Kagame during the genocide, he asked about the delay. “He knew full well that every day of fighting on the periphery meant certain death for Tutsis still behind [Rwanda government forces] lines,” Dallaire wrote in Shake Hands With the Devil. “[Kagame] ignored the implications of my question.”

In the years that followed, Bill Clinton apologised numerous times for the US’s inaction during the genocide. “If we’d gone in sooner, I believe we could have saved at least a third of the lives that were lost,” he told journalist Tania Bryer in 2013. Instead, Europeans and Americans extracted their own citizens and the UN peacekeepers quietly withdrew. But Dallaire indicates that Kagame would have rejected Clinton’s help in any case. “The international community is

looking at sending an intervention force on humanitarian grounds,” Kagame told Dallaire. “But for what reason? If an intervention force is sent to Rwanda, we,” – meaning the RPF – “will fight it.”

As the RPF advanced, Hutu refugees fled into neighbouring countries. In late April, television stations around the world broadcast images of thousands upon thousands of them crossing the Rusumo Bridge from Rwanda into Tanzania, as the bloated corpses of Rwandans floated down the Kagera river beneath them. Most viewers assumed that all the corpses were Tutsis killed by Hutu génocidaires. But the river drains mainly from areas then held by the RPF, and Mark Prutsalis, a UN official working in the Tanzanian refugee camps, maintains that at least some of the bodies were probably Hutu victims of reprisal killings by the RPF. One refugee after another told him that RPF soldiers had gone house to house in Hutu areas, dragging people out, tying them up and throwing them in the river. The UN estimated later that the RPF killed some 10,000 civilians each month during the genocide.

Lawrence Nsereko was among the journalists on the Rusumo Bridge that day and as the bodies floated by, he noticed something strange. The upper arms of some of them had been tied with ropes behind their backs. In Uganda, this method of restraint is known as the “three-piece tie”; it puts extreme pressure on the breastbone, causing searing pain, and may result in gangrene. Amnesty International had recently highlighted it as a signature torture method of Museveni’s army, and Lawrence wondered whether the RPF had learned this technique from their Ugandan patrons.

In June 1994, while the slaughter in Rwanda was still underway, Museveni travelled to Minneapolis, where he received a Hubert H Humphrey public service medal and honorary doctorate from the University of Minnesota. The dean, a former World Bank official, praised Museveni for ending human rights abuses in Uganda and preparing his country for multiparty democracy. Western journalists and academics showered Museveni with praise. “Uganda [is] one of the few flickers of hope for the future of black Africa,” wrote one. The New York Times compared the Ugandan leader to Nelson Mandela, and Time magazine hailed him as a “herdsman and philosopher” and “central Africa’s intellectual compass.”

Museveni also visited Washington on that trip, where he met with Clinton and his national security adviser, Anthony Lake. I could find no record of what the men discussed, but I can imagine the Americans lamenting the tragedy in Rwanda, and the Ugandan explaining that this disaster only confirmed his long-held theory that Africans were too attached to clan loyalties for multiparty democracy. The continent’s ignorant peasants belonged under the control of autocrats like himself.

Main image: Human skulls arranged at the Murambi genocide memorial, near Butare, Rwanda. Photographed by Jose Cendon for AFP

This is an adapted extract from Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda and the War on Terror, published by Columbia Global Reports. To order a copy for £9.34, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

My journey back to Rwanda: confronting the ghosts of the genocide 21 years later As a UN investigator Lyal S Sunga witnessed the aftermath of Rwanda’s genocide first hand. Now he returns to the country to make peace with his past

Lyal S Sunga The Guardian newspaper

Lyal S Sunga is head of the Rule of Law programme at the Hague Institute for Global Justice

Fri 15 Jan 2016 05.45 ESTLast modified on Fri 6 Oct 2017 08.14 EDT

The Gisozi memorial in Kigali. Survivors donated photos to mark the country’s 1994 genocide. Photograph: Radu

Sigheti/Reuters

When I arrived in Rwanda on 29 October 1994, I could never have guessed how the experience would change my life.

I was deployed by the UN to conduct investigations and ghostwrite reports for the UN security council’s Commission of Experts on Rwanda. In the aftermath of the violence that year, the commission, appointed by the then UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali set out to determine the facts and responsibilities relating to the violations and to recommend measures the security council should take to restore the rule of law and accountability.

When I arrived, the country was one of the world’s worst crime scenes: during the summer, between 500,000 and 1 million Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu civilians had been wiped out from Rwanda’s population of 7 million.

What I saw

The first place I visited was Nyamirambo, a neighbourhood in the south-west part of Kigali. A few months earlier, around 6,000 people had been killed there over a three-day period. Buildings showed heavy machine-gun and rocket damage. Mass graves containing hundreds of men, women and children were found close by and not far down the road, stood a convent with blood-stained walls where nuns were gang-raped and massacred. We encountered a woman with her 10-year-old son who was grossly disfigured from a full force machete blow to his face. The mother showed us machete hack wounds at the back of her skull.

The days that followed, as we visited and investigated different sites, were harrowing. In Gikondo, another area of Kigali, we walked along the road surveying extensive damage to a mosque and a Methodist church

from machine-gun and rocket fire. In the town parish, run by Polish Catholic Frères Pallottins, blood-stained ropes and pockmarks in the concrete floors were evidence of torture and summary executions. More than a hundred were killed there. Outside, the ground was dotted with mass graves, filled with half-burnt remains.

The next day, we travelled by helicopter to Ntarama, landing 70 metres downhill from a church where around 400 out of 5,000 bodies still lay unburied after an attack five months earlier. It was in that serene place where I first experienced the stench of decomposed human flesh; a sickly, sweet smell that is difficult to forget.

My colleague guided me across the threshold into Ntarama church and steadied me on the first-row pew. Rotting corpses filled every row of the church. It felt like the fear, panic and extreme distress of men, women and children in their final moments still hung in the air. The forensic team removed 252 bodies from that room alone and assembled a macabre arrangement of baby skulls for further analysis. Many trees stained with blood and rope pointed to where individuals were tortured and murdered. Witnesses told us how they had seen militia returning twice to the massacre scene within a few hours to wipe out any survivors.

Two kilometres away, we visited a medical dispensary run by a religious mission. In the corner of one room were the remains of a small boy, crouched with his back to the corner with a two-metre spear still stuck through his throat from front to back. His terrified expression and posture portrayed how he had been cornered, taunted and then speared.

On and on it went at massacre sites at Nyarubuye, Gafunzo, Cyangugu, Sake, Mbazi and others too numerous to count. When we returned to Kigali we trod carefully to avoid landmines and unexploded weapons – mindful of the many one-legged children we saw hobbling around the city. I plugged my nostrils with alcohol-soaked hand wipes, but it couldn’t block out the stench of death. Walking alone behind the team on one trip I found myself treading on large, crunchy, dead scarab beetles that had eaten away human flesh: a carpet of the dead feasting on the dead.

The skulls of victims at a memorial to over 11,000 Tutsi men, women and children (also buried here in a mass grave)

who were killed while seeking refuge in the catholic church of Kibuye. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

Returning home to Geneva: ‘I felt terribly alone’

After leaving Rwanda in 1994, I tried to forget what I had seen, but the horror of what I had witnessed during these 10 days of intensive investigations was impossible to shake. Immediately after I returned to Switzerland I struggled to get out of bed and go to work – the contrast between home and what I had seen was too much. I lay in bed wondering how the international community could have failed to halt the

genocide. I felt terribly alone in the feeling that strangers on the street must have had little idea what had happened in the country people called the “Switzerland of Africa”. You try to forget, then without any warning something you hear, see or smell unleashes the memories: fear, panic and then profound sadness soon follow.

And yet I was aware that my flashbacks, mercifully few and far between, provide only a fleeting glimpse into the enormous suffering of hundreds of thousands of victims and survivors. In late 1994 many people throughout Rwanda were fearful of the neighbours who had joined in on the murderous onslaught. In the months following the genocide many villagers had to live month after month among the dead, too numerous to be buried. Who among them could board a plane to rich and peaceful Switzerland like I did?

‘I returned to the same church I stood in 21 years before’

The security council acted swiftly on the commission’s findings and recommendations on 8 November 1994 by establishing the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) to prosecute those responsible for genocide and other serious violations of international humanitarian law in Rwanda committed during 1994.

21 years after his first visit, Lyal returned to the Ntarama church in December 2015. Photograph: Mona M’Bikay

Boin

Last month, after 21 years of investigations and trials, the ICTR closed, ending an important chapter in international efforts to enforce criminal responsibility for the atrocities. The tribunal has indicted 93 individuals and convicted 61. But not all of the thousands of perpetrators went through Rwanda’s customary gacaca trials that ended in June 2012, and so Rwanda, together with other countries, still has to hunt down the remaining suspects, provide them with a fair trial and punish the guilty.

On 1 December I attended the ICTR’s closing ceremonies in Arusha, Tanzania, less for the proceedings themselves than for the chance to seek closure from what I saw in Rwanda 21 years ago. After the event, instead of returning directly home, I headed for Rwanda. I had to find out whether a country could recover from such violence. Could justice, economic development, political inclusiveness and the rule of law somehow vanquish ghosts of the past?

I returned to Ntarama church to stand for a moment on the same pew where I had stood 21 years before. The bodies of hundreds of massacred children, women and men had long since been moved into caskets.

This time, I didn’t have to watch my every step for fear of treading on human remains, for now a neat, clean path led visitors around the massacre site.

People were alive, working, talking, and smiling, and the gently reassuring hum of traffic replaced the silence and human stench of 1994. A guide led me to the entrance of another much smaller structure where human remains, a reminder of the tragedy, lay similar to the way I had seen them over two decades ago, tangled up in tragic embrace. What I saw reminded me too much of what I saw 21 years ago: I turned away and quickly re-entered the sunlight.

Ignoring personal ghosts, or those of an entire country traumatised by war and genocide, is futile and even dangerous. On returning to Rwanda, and seeing how the country has progressed, I was reassured of the power of confronting the past. But to properly heal, the fight to restore justice, preserve the rule of law and democratic governance, must continue.

Lyal S Sunga is head of the Rule of Law programme at the Hague Institute for Global Justice in The Netherlands, and visiting professor at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Lund, Sweden.

Rwanda's Genocide Victims Remembered 25 Years Later April 7, 20192:15 PM ET NPR news

FRANCESCA PARIS

African Union Commission Chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat (from left), Rwandan President Paul Kagame, Rwandan first

lady Jeannette Kagame and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker light the flame of remembrance at the Kigali

Genocide Memorial in Kigali, Rwanda, on Sunday.

Ben Curtis/AP

With the start of collective mourning set to last for months, Rwandans are marking 25 years since a genocide that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

In Rwanda's capital, Kigali, on Sunday, President Paul Kagame led foreign dignitaries and Rwandans in memorial ceremonies, including laying wreaths of white flowers and lighting a flame at the Kigali Genocide Memorial. The flame will burn for 100 days, the entirety of the annual period of mourning, which mirrors the length of the genocide. About 800,000 Rwandans, most of them from the country's Tutsi minority, were killed during the 1994 genocide.

"Twenty-five years later, here we are," Kagame said. "All of us. Wounded and heartbroken, yes. But unvanquished." Leaders of Chad, Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Niger, Belgium, Canada, Ethiopia, the African Union and the European Union were among the many in attendance, The Associated Press reports. After the ceremony, Rwandans walked through the city, from the Rwandan Parliament to the city's Amahoro Stadium, for a night vigil. Others across the world marked the commemoration online with #Kwibuka25 — the word for "remember" in Kinyarwanda, the country's official language. "Time can never erase the darkest hours in our history," wrote Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, on Twitter. "But it is at the heart of our darkest moments that begins our ascent to the light."

Family photographs of some of those who died are displayed in an exhibition at the Kigali Genocide Memorial on Friday.

Ben Curtis/AP

During the commemoration period in previous years, Rwandans have held memorial ceremonies in villages and districts where victims are buried, listening to survivors give testimony and local and national leaders tell the history of the genocide, according to The Conversation. Ethnic violence broke out in Rwanda on April 7, 1994, after President Juvénal Habyarimana of the country's Hutu majority died in a plane crash, along with Burundi's Hutu president. Hutus said that Tutsi rebels had shot down the plane as it had approached Kigali's airport. Killing began within hours, as many in the country turned on the Tutsis and even moderate Hutus, often targeting their own neighbors. The violence continued until Tutsi-led rebels took control of the capital in July 1994.

The genocide was marked by a rapid, well-organized campaign of violence, as well as the systematic rape of hundreds of thousands of women. Some victims were buried in mass graves that went undiscovered for more than two decades, including four unmarked graves discovered just last year. The violence also highlighted a failure on the part of international peacekeeping forces. Shortly after the genocide began, the U.N. Security Council pulled most U.N. peacekeepers out of Rwanda, causing the tragedy to be "compounded by the faltering response of the international community," according to the United Nations.

WORLD

Recalling Rwanda's Brutal '100 Days' David Simon, co-director of Yale University's Genocide Studies Program, said that the withdrawal of forces stemmed in part from France's connection to the genocidal regime.

"[Rwandans] remain, I think, justifiably very angry at the way the world, especially in the form of the United Nations but also the French in particular, let them down," Simon told NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro. "And that still reverberates in 2019." French President Emmanuel Macron said on Sunday that he wanted to create a national day of commemoration for the genocide. On Friday, Macron ordered a government study into France's role in Rwanda before and during the genocide, the AP reported. A group of researchers and historians has been tasked with investigating the "role and involvement of France" and drawing conclusions within two years.

Opinion

They Committed Genocide. Their Neighbors Welcomed Them Home.

Twenty-five years after they participated in one of the world’s most atrocious instances of mass violence, their experiences in Rwanda show that peace and reconciliation are possible.

By Hollie Nyseth Brehm and Laura C. Frizzell

Dr. Nyseth Brehm is an assistant professor and Ms. Frizzell is a graduate student at Ohio State University.

• April 24, 2019

Daphrosa Mukamusoni, a former Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda combatant, at the Reintegration and Demobilization Center in Mutobo, Rwanda, where released prisoners spend three months learning to reintegrate into society before they return to the families and communities they left decades before.Credit...Jacques Nkinzingabo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

What happens when hundreds of thousands of people who committed genocide leave prison and return to the communities where they perpetrated violence? This might sound like the plot of a dystopian novel, but in Rwanda, it is reality.

Twenty-five years ago this month, Rwanda crumbled as violence swept across the country. Although political leaders orchestrated the genocide, several hundred thousand Hutu civilians participated by killing or raping members of the Tutsi minority. After the genocide ended, the new Rwandan government created a court system to hold those civilians accountable. Roughly 312,000 trials resulted in prison sentences — including 15,444 life sentences — propelling Rwanda to one of the highest incarceration rates in the world.

Over the past few years, tens of thousands of the convicted genocidaires have been completing their sentences and returning to their communities — once again becoming neighbors to families they harmed.

In 2017, we traveled to Rwanda to find out how these people and their communities are managing this tense situation. Since then, we have been following nearly 200 returning citizens from their final days in prison to their lives back in their communities.

What we learned about their experiences surprised us and taught us about the human capacity for forgiveness and reconciliation.

When we first met Protais, one of the returning genocidaires we interviewed, he was completing his sentence and preparing to return home and rejoin his wife. He expected to be met with hostility upon return, telling us he assumed members of the community hated him. Instead, he found “an amazing situation beyond any comparison.” Neighbors came from “near and far” to welcome him home.

Protais’ experience was not unique. Another man, Straton served almost 21 years in prison for murdering three people. When he was released, he could barely recognize his surroundings because of Rwanda’s vast economic growth. Dirt roads had been paved and new buildings were everywhere, meaning he ultimately had to ask strangers how to find his house. There, he found his wife and children, and after a joyous reunion, the next few days were full of pleasant surprises. “There are people that I never expected to help or to greet me, and they did it … Neighbors would come with Fanta. Some friends would come and give me small amounts of money.”

Fidele, who had killed a person in his village, was able to notify his wife and children when he completed his 22-year sentence. They met him at the bus stop and guided him home while his wife reintroduced him to neighbors they passed on the way. “The following day, some of these neighbors came to my house,” Fidele recalled. “They came and we shared. Each of them contributed money for one bottle of alcohol.” A few days later, Fidele even visited a sibling of the person he killed. Though he was nervous, they went to a bar together and talked. In his words, “We shared a glass.”

Image

Serubanza Boniface, a former combatant, attends a class at a vocational training center in Mutobo, Rwanda. Credit...Jacques Nkinzingabo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images We initially had trouble believing these stories. But, we found them to be remarkably common, and we often witnessed warm greetings with our own eyes. Neighbors, including survivors and their families, visit the former prisoners and bring beans, bananas, Fanta, and other small gifts to welcome them back to their communities. Sometimes, neighbors even help to sustain returning citizens who would otherwise have no food to eat.

What could explain such an unlikely, friendly welcome? Much of the answer lies in where many Rwandans place blame for the genocide. Sources like public school curriculums and government-run memorials paint a complex picture of the violence as rooted in Belgian colonial rule that exacerbated divisions between Hutu and Tutsi. These sources also highlight the “bad governments” that discriminated against Tutsi and

encouraged violence during the genocide. By placing blame on historical colonialism and governments, this dominant narrative removes some of the responsibility from the individuals who perpetrated the violence on the ground — especially the uneducated farmers who claim they were acting out of fear or were following orders.

This does not mean that those returning are not culpable for their actions or that the country’s deep wounds are healed. Many survivors deal with painful memories and trauma on a daily basis. Former prisoners also face problems like most other previously incarcerated people as they struggle to return to their former lives. Many do not have enough food or a place to live, and some people’s spouses and children have disowned them for what they did. Such stories of hardship are especially common among the women we have interviewed, who are particularly likely to face abandonment from spouses and economic woes.

Yet we do not believe that these general hardships take away from our broader finding of acceptance and generosity on behalf of neighbors, community members and survivors. Healing from such unimaginable trauma will always be a work in progress, but it is happening.

There are lessons here for other nations as well, including the United States. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized country in the world and despite recent advances, much of the stigma attached to a felony conviction remains. Our prevailing ethos of individualism means that we tend to place all of the blame for an individual’s crime squarely on their shoulders without questioning how powerful people and structures constrain the choices available to the least powerful people. To be clear, we do not suggest that people who commit crimes are blameless, or that the predominant narrative of the genocide in Rwanda is without fault. Instead, we highlight how emphasizing complex causes of violence humanizes perpetrators in meaningful ways.

Victims’ clothes displayed earlier this month after being recovered from mass graves from the 1994 Rwandan genocide and hidden under houses in Kabuga, Rwanda.Credit...Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The survivors of crimes should not have to be the ones who try to understand why someone committed violence. Moreover, survivors should not feel obligated to welcome the very people who killed their friends and family members. But, in Rwanda, many are. And the small acts we have witnessed, such as visiting a returning neighbor with a Fanta, convey a much larger message: 25 years after one of the world’s most atrocious instances of mass violence, peace and reconciliation are possible.

Hollie Nyseth Brehm is an assistant professor of sociology and Laura C. Frizzell is a graduate student at Ohio State University.

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Half a million ghosts

How well has Rwanda healed 25 years after the genocide?

Not well enough, apparently, for President Paul Kagame to ease his grip

The Economist Print edition | Middle East and Africa

Mar 28th 2019| KIGALI

Twenty-five years after the genocide, Rwanda is still an enigma. Its recovery in economic, social and psychological terms is hotly debated. Almost every aspect of the past and present is still argued over. What exactly caused the genocide (which started after a plane carrying Rwanda’s president, Juvénal Habyarimana, was shot down by unknown assassins)? How many people died? Could outsiders, in particular the un, have halted it?

More recently, has President Paul Kagame, the Tutsi rebel commander who stopped the genocide at gunpoint and has ruled ever since, genuinely sought to heal the wounds? Or does he cynically exploit the horror to legitimise his ruthlessly authoritarian and predominantly Tutsi regime? Are the Hutus, still a large majority, quietly determined to take over again one day? Could democracy ever take root in Rwanda—or is a firm grip on government the least bad option?

What is undisputed is that the killing that began on April 7th 1994 was genocide. Probably three-quarters of all Tutsis in Rwanda—men, women, children and babies—were murdered. The true number is unknown. The un guesses 800,000: mostly Tutsis, but also 30,000 or so moderate Hutus. Mr Kagame prefers a round figure of a million. The meticulous Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch was able to substantiate 500,000 deaths. She was later barred from Rwanda for criticising Mr Kagame’s regime.

The slaughter was shockingly swift, lasting only 100 days. Probably most adult Hutus took part or witnessed the killing without objection. Hutus were then 84% of Rwandans, so their Tutsi neighbours had nowhere to run. As Philip Gourevitch, a journalist, put it: “The entire Hutu population was called upon to kill the entire Tutsi population.”

Hutus with babies on their backs hacked down Tutsi women similarly encumbered. Hutu priests oversaw massacres of Tutsis in their congregations. Hutu husbands killed Tutsi wives. Hutus were told that if they failed to kill, they would themselves be killed. Though the Rwandan army often lobbed grenades into churches and schools and fired on Tutsis cowering there, most murders were carried out by civilians wielding machetes and clubs.

The issue of justice still reverberates and rankles. A year after the genocide about 120,000 suspected perpetrators were put in prisons built for 45,000. Another 300,000 were eventually incarcerated in appalling conditions. Some 46,000 Rwandans, most of them génocidaires, are still behind bars.

Such was the scale of the genocide that from 2002 until 2012 a huge web of community courts known as gacaca (pronounced “gatchatcha”) was set up, under trees and in village courtyards, to dispense justice in a more traditional fashion, by asking witnesses to tell their stories before amateur judges. “No one claims that gacaca justice was perfect but very few here doubt that it saved Rwanda,” says Nick Johnson, a British law professor. With justice has come a measure of reconciliation. “No other country today has so many perpetrators of mass atrocities living in such proximity to their victims’ families,” writes Phil Clark of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Mr Kagame’s great claim is that there has been no large-scale violence inside Rwanda for the past 24 years. Mr Clark, who has conducted more than 1,000 interviews with Rwandans on both sides of the Hutu-Tutsi gap in the past 16 years, says his respondents nowadays describe “peaceful but uneasy community relations”.

In part this has been achieved through a widely understood, if unspoken, contract whereby people have traded political freedom for peace and economic development. The economy has recovered rapidly. Infant mortality has halved since 2000, a feat unicef rates as “one of the most significant in human history”. In 1995, when the country lay in ruins, gdp per person was $125. Today it is around $800, though some economists question Rwanda’s rosy statistics.

Few Rwandans have the nerve to dissent. A Rwandan journalist warns that “no one will ever tell you truly what they think.” A Western diplomat concurs. “People just won’t talk freely.” Mr Kagame may have slightly loosened his elaborate system of spies and social controls of late, yet there is precious little space for political competition. He won 99% of the vote in 2017. A compliant Green Party was allowed seats in parliament last year, but its members recall how, in 2010, unknown killers cut off its vice-president’s head. Last year two opposition leaders who had sought to run for president were freed from prison, including Victoire Ingabire, a Hutu who had been sentenced to 15 years on trumped-up charges of inciting “divisionist” (ie, Hutu v Tutsi) rebellion. Her spokesman was murdered this month.

Mr Kagame has scaled back his military adventures abroad. Initially these were intended to hunt down génocidaires lurking mainly in the forests of neighbouring Congo, but they expanded into calamitous regional wars during which Congo’s minerals were looted and multitudes died. Recently, Mr Kagame has fallen out badly with Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, once a close ally, whom he now accuses of harbouring Rwandan “traitors”. He particularly detests the Rwandan National Congress, a group of fellow Tutsis who were once his closest comrades. It has supporters across a wide diaspora, including in Belgium, South Africa, Uganda and America. Several have been assassinated on foreign soil.

Twenty-five years after taking power, Mr Kagame faces two tests. The first is whether he will be able to hand over smoothly to a successor. The second is whether, when he does go, Rwanda’s terrible wounds will reopen.

Mr Kagame’s boosters argue that only he has the authority to hold together so fragile a country. That argument loses force with each passing year. Under a fifth of the population is old enough to have been adults during the genocide. Most children have grown up with the idea of “Rwandaness”, inculcated into them in education camps, known as ingando, that try to minimise ethnic differences. More will begin to demand freedoms enjoyed elsewhere. Without the safety valve of democracy, protests and anger could again take on an ethnic tinge, awakening the demons that Mr Kagame claims to have banished.

Rwanda's genocide — what happened, why it happened, and how it still matters

Vox By Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com Apr 10, 2014, 4:30pm EDT

A man with a machete poses near a refugee camp in Rukumbell, Rwanda on May 5, 1994. Scott Peterson/Liaison/Getty Images

This week marks 20 years since the start of the genocide in Rwanda, so the world has spent some time reflecting on one of the most horrifying — and most defining — events in post-Cold War history.

What may have gotten lost in all of this is what actually happened in Rwanda, a land-locked, Maryland-sized country in central Africa. Here's what you need to know about how 1 million people were systematically slaughtered, why it happened, how it changed the world, and where Rwanda stands today.

What happened

The Rwandan genocide was a systematic campaign by the Hutu ethnic majority aimed at wiping out each and every member of the minority Tutsi group. The Hutu-controlled government and allied militias slaughtered between 800,000 and one million Tutsis before a Tutsi rebel group overthrew them. Over 100,000 Hutus were also killed, including both moderate Hutus killed by Hutu extremists and those killed by Tutsis in so-called "revenge killings."

The genocide was set into motion by the death of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana. On April 6th, 1994, Habyarimana's plane was shot down by a missile of unknown origin. Government-aligned forces used (Hutu) Habyarimana's death as an excuse to begin a campaign of slaughter they had been planning for some time, and the genocide began on April 7th. It went on for about 100 days.

The story behind the Rwandan genocide begins with colonialism

The split between Hutus and Tutsis arose not as a result of religious or cultural differences, but economic ones. "Hutus" were people who farmed crops, while "Tutsis" were people who tended livestock. Most Rwandans were Hutus. Gradually, these class divisions became seen as ethnic designations.

Because cattle were more valuable than crops, the minority Tutsis became the local elite. By the time Belgium took over

the land in 1917 from Germany (who took it in 1884), an ethnic Tutsi elite had been the ruling monarchy for quite some time.

THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE WAS A DIRECTED, PRE-MEDITATED ATTEMPT TO ELIMINATE AN ENTIRE PEOPLE

German and Belgian rule made the dividing lines between the groups sharper. This "divide and conquer" strategy meant supporting the Tutsi monarchy and requiring that all local chiefs be Tutsis, turning the Tutsis into symbols of colonial rule for the Hutu majority.

Post-independence, the resentment created by colonial divide-and-conquer bred violence. Seeing as Hutus were a large majority, they handily won the country's first elections in 1961, and the regime that followed was staunchly Hutu nationalist. Intermittent violence between Hutus and Tutsis became a feature of post-independent Rwandan

The Rwandan genocide was a pre-planned extermination campaign

A Hutu militiaman shows off his sheath on May 25, 1994. Scott Peterson/Liason

The Rwandan genocide was a different class of violence altogether from what came before it. It wasn't just wartime violence; it was a directed, pre-meditated attempt to eliminate an entire people.

The Hutu government had fought a war with Ugandan-based Tutsi rebels, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), from 1990 to 1993. By early 1994 at the latest, many Hutus, including a number of important government officials, had come to the conclusion that the real problem was Rwanda's Tutsi minority. They began organizing armed paramilitary gangs and training them to prepare to wipe out Tutsi civilians.

President Habyarimana had agreed to a United Nations-enforced peace agreement with the RPF. The missile that shot down Habyarimana's plane shattered that agreement. We still don't know today whether Tutsi rebels or Hutu extremists

opposed to the peace agreement fired the missile, but it quickly became irrelevant. The Hutu ethnic supremacists saw a green light to begin their extermination campaign.

On April 7th, the killing began. Hutu militias, most infamously the government-backed Interahamwe, went city-to-city and village-to-village, slaughtering Tutsis with guns and machetes. The militias were horrifyingly efficient, using a radio station to coordinate the beginnings of the campaign around the country and to tell people where "the graves were not quite yet full." They were killing at a pace of about 8000 Tutsis per day.

There's a strong case the world could have stopped it

UN soldiers in Rwanda in 1994. Scott Peterson/Liason/Getty Images

Unlike earlier mass killings, such as the Holocaust, the international community had advance evidence of the coming genocide. Once it launched, they had evidence of where it was going, and still did nothing.

Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, who commanded the small UN observer force tasked with implementing the peace agreement, heard the Hutus were planning genocide in January 1994. He informed the higher-ups at the UN, but wasn't permitted to act.

Even after the genocide began, and the evidence of slaughter became undeniable, the international community did nothing. The United States actively discouraged the UN Security Council from authorizing a more robust deployment.

In hindsight, there's a good chance the UN could have done something. General Dallaire believes that, with an extra 5,000 troops and a stronger UN mandate, he could have saved "hundreds of thousands." The failure to intervene, which Bill Clinton calls one of the greatest regrets of his presidency, catalyzed the modern movement in favor of humanitarian military intervention to prevent genocide. Two major Obama administration officials — Susan Rice and Samantha Power — became converted to the cause of humanitarian intervention in part due to America's inaction in Rwanda.

It ended only after Tutsi rebels defeated the government

The day after the genocide began, the Tutsi rebel group RPF, led by Paul Kagame, launched an offensive aimed at toppling the Rwandan government. In about one hundred days, the RPF defeated the government forces. Kagame, a Tutsi, became the country's leader in all but name: a Hutu was technically made president while Kagame was vice president, but Kagame controlled the army.

SADLY, THERE'S NO REASON TO STOP WORRYING ABOUT RWANDA EVEN 20 YEARS AFTER THE GENOCIDE

Though the RPF stopped the genocide from reaching its completion, their victory was hardly clean. A Human Rights Watch assessment of the campaign concluded that "systematic" RPF killings claimed tens of thousands of Hutu lives. These "revenge killings" by oppressed are sadly common after episodes of mass killing, and one reason why the lack of international peacekeeping forces can be so devastating.

Moreover, the aftershocks of the Rwandan genocide contributed to the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). That war, the deadliest since World War 2, was sparked in part by 2 million Hutus fleeing Rwanda attacking Tutsis. Some of the 2 million were militiamen, who attacked Tutsis in the DRC. The Kagame government supported local Tutsi forces, and the conflict escalated.

Rwanda today is a much better place, but still suffers from authoritarianism and violence

Rwandan President Paul Kagame in 2014. Thierry Roge-Pool/Photonews/Getty Images

Today, Kagame still runs Rwanda — he's officially been president since 2000. His record has been extraordinarily mixed; he's done an incredible job helping rebuild life in Rwanda since the genocide, but he's also sponsored violence around the region, killed political dissidents, and consolidated authoritarian power.

Start with the good. Rwanda's life expectancy has doubled in the past decade, and child mortality and HIV rates have plummeted. The Rwandan economy has grown at a staggeringly high 8 percent rate since 2008, making it, by one assessment, the most desirable African country to invest in.

However, Kagame's government is described by his critics as an ethnic autocracy. Tutsis (who make up 10 percent of the government) staff most official positions, especially in the military. Kagame has supported murderous foreign militias, like the M23 in the DRC, and may have been complicit in revenge killings.

Perhaps most ominously, a statistical assessment of the risk of state-led mass killing puts Rwanda in the top 15 percent of countries most likely to see mass killing. Sadly, there's no reason to stop worrying about Rwanda even 20 years after the genocide.

Rwanda Marks 25 Years Since the Genocide. The Country Is Still Grappling With Its Legacy.

NY Times By Alan Cowell

• April 6, 2019

It was a paroxysm that inscribed new chapters in the annals of genocide and turned a spotlight on the failure of international peacekeepers to come anywhere close to living up to their name.

Twenty-five years ago, on April 7, 1994, the dominant Hutus of Rwanda turned with well-planned violence on the Tutsi minority whom they held to be traitors. One hundred days later, when the killing finally stopped, the death toll stood at as many as one million, mostly Tutsis but also including some moderate Hutus who had opposed the bloodletting.

The scale of the fatalities was shocking, but more was to come as the torrent of killings washed into the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, igniting years of strife in Africa’s Great Lakes region. And, along this bloodstained way, sexual violence became woven into the horrors of war. Women suffered untold rapes and gang rapes, accelerating the spread of AIDS. The offspring of these assaults were stigmatized as “children of the killers.”

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A Hutu man whose face was mutilated by the Hutu Interahamwe militia, who suspected him of sympathizing with the Tutsi rebels.Credit...James Nachtwey Archive, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth

The massacre site at the Rukara parish in Kabgayi, Rwanda, in April 1994.Credit...Gilles Peress/Magnum Photos

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A Rwandan girl fleeing factional violence sat among her family’s possessions on the road to Goma, in what is now Democratic Republic of Congo.Credit...David Turnley/Corbis, via Getty Images

In the same year in which Nelson Mandela was installed as South Africa’s first black president — the very emblem of a continent’s hope and triumph over adversity — Africa was also in the public eye for cataclysmic anarchy and violence.

But Africa had no monopoly on blame.

The United States, scarred by the killing and humiliation of its soldiers in Somalia during the Battle of Mogadishu a few months earlier, had no appetite to intervene. President Bill Clinton, who was in office as the killings unfolded half a world away, said years later during a visit to Rwanda, “I don’t think we could have ended the violence, but I think we could have cut it down. And I regret it.”

France, a significant player in French-speaking Africa, has long faced charges that it supported the Hutu leadership before and even during the massacres. President Paul Kagame of Rwanda has called French soldiers “actors” in the genocide — a charge denied by the former French prime minister, Édouard Balladur, as “a self-interested lie.” But on Friday, President Emmanuel Macron of France ordered a two-year government study of France’s role in the Rwandan genocide.

Paul Kagame, left, the leader of the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, near Kigali in 1994.Credit...Gilles Peress/Magnum Photos

Thousands of abandoned machetes at the border between Rwanda and Tanzania. Hutu refugees were allowed to cross on the condition they left behind their weapons.Credit...David Turnley/Corbis, via Getty Images

The exhumation of the victims of the Nyarubuye massacre, in which more than 1,000 people were killed.Credit...Gilles Peress/Magnum Photos

The United Nations, which had a modest force of some 2,500 troops in Rwanda in the days leading up to the killings, was accused of refusing permission for its local commander, the Canadian Maj. Gen. Roméo Dallaire, to raid a Hutu arms cache that had been set aside for use in the atrocities. At the time, Kofi Annan,

who later became the secretary general of the United Nations, was in charge of peacekeeping operations. Years later he said of the killing, “All of us must bitterly regret that we did not do more to prevent it.”

History suggests, however, that Rwanda’s lessons were an insufficient deterrent. Just a year after the Rwandan genocide, events far away in Europe — in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica — offered another alarming example of the toxic combination of genocidal urges and United Nations caution: 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were murdered despite the presence of Dutch peacekeepers.

And, for its part, an African panel found many culprits for Rwanda’s agony, from the Roman Catholic Church to Belgium, a former colonial power.

Rebel soldiers from the Rwanda Patriotic Front near Nyamata, Rwanda.Credit...Gilles Peress/Magnum Photos

Hutus living in this house scrawled their ethnicity on the wall to prevent looting. They fled to escape the advance of the rebel forces.Credit...Gilles Peress/Magnum Photos

Rwanda Patriotic Front rebels inspecting the wreckage of a plane crash that killed the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi in April 1994.Credit...Corinne Dufka/Reuters

The ostensible trigger for the genocide came on April 6, 1994, when an airplane carrying the country’s Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana, and President Cyprien Ntaryamira of neighboring Burundi was shot down as it approached Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. It has never been clearly established who brought the plane down or whether the genocide had been planned well in advance and needed only a spark to ignite its lethal tinder.

But within hours, the killing had started. Elite government forces, supported by a dreaded Hutu militia, the Interahamwe, which translates roughly as “those who work together,” rounded up and executed Tutsi military and political leaders. Roadblocks were thrown up to filter out Rwandans whose official ID tagged them as Tutsis — a distinction introduced in the 1930s by the Belgian colonial authorities. Like their imperial German predecessors, Belgian officials had favored a Tutsi elite until the Hutu majority rose up in 1959.

In rural areas, where Hutus and Tutsis had intermingled and sometimes intermarried, pervasive government propaganda in radio broadcasts and newspaper articles urged Hutus to take any weapon they could find — machetes, clubs — to kill or maim their neighbors. Foreigners working in the country were evacuated, but not their Rwandan staff. People were massacred in churches and homes, fields and roadside ditches, stadiums and checkpoints.

A refugee camp in Tanzania in 1994, near the border with Rwanda.Credit...Gilles Peress/Magnum Photos

As in Cambodia after the atrocities by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, future generations inherited a national nightmare, memorialized in the exhibited skulls of victims stacked in rows.

In 1994, the genocide also ruptured a cease-fire in a civil war that had been raging since 1990 between government forces and insurgents from the Rwanda Patriotic Front, led by the Tutsi Mr. Kagame (who was to become Rwanda’s president).

The Patriotic Front launched a broad attack to take the capital, Kigali, in early July. The killing in Rwanda itself came to a halt, but not the ethnic recriminations. With the land ruined, crops untended and the population diminished by the killing of Tutsis and the subsequent flight of Hutu refugees into Congo, Rwanda entered a new, gradually prospering but ambiguous era. The following years raised questions about post-genocide justice and the price Rwandans paid for well-being and stability under Mr. Kagame.

A refugee camp in Goma.Credit...Gilles Peress/Magnum Photos

Contaminated water helped cause the cholera epidemic which struck a refugee camp in Goma.Credit...Tom Stoddart/Getty Images

A common grave for cholera victims at a refugee camp in Goma.Credit...Gilles Peress/Magnum Photos

Internationally, the Rwandan leader, who took over the presidency in 2000, became a darling of Western leaders and donors, including Mr. Clinton and Bill Gates. His cities boasted clean streets and low crime. His economy grew rapidly. Admirers compared him to Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who fused authoritarian rule with prosperity.

And, as Mr. Kagame’s regime grew ever more entrenched and ever more intolerant of dissent, he often got a pass. “Western states that did nothing to prevent the massacres have treated Rwanda with kid gloves ever since, in part out of a frequently acknowledged sense of guilt,” the author and journalist Michela Wrong wrote in The Guardian.

Mr. Kagame was limited to two terms in office, but like his regional peers in Uganda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo — and rulers much farther afield — he chafed at the restriction. A referendum in 2015 changed the Constitution, enabling him to remain in office until 2034. In elections in 2017 he won with a staggering 98.8 percent of the vote. (Of his two major opponents, Diane Rwigara was disqualified, later to be jailed, and Victoire Ingabire was already in prison.)

A Rwandan confronting an inmate in a session for detainees who were accused of crimes committed during the genocide.Credit...Marco Longari/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Murambi Genocide Memorial is a tribute to around 45,000 Tutsis who took refuge in a school, where they were massacred by Hutu extremists.Credit...Larry Towell/Magnum Photos

A commemoration for the 20th anniversary of the genocide, in Kigali in 2014.Credit...Carl De Keyzer/Magnum Photos

Rights groups have chronicled abuses inside Rwanda and have accused the authorities of hunting down adversaries and critics in Uganda, Kenya, South Africa and Europe. In 2014, Patrick Karegeya, Mr. Kagame’s former chief of external intelligence and a known dissident, was found murdered in a luxury hotel in Johannesburg, although the government in Kigali has denied suggestions that it was behind the killing.

In 2014, as Rwanda marked the 20th anniversary of the genocide, an editorial in The New York Times hailed the country as “an island of order and relative prosperity in a poor and politically volatile region.”

But, listing a tally of restrictions on civil and political rights, including detentions and torture, disappearances and killings, the article concluded: “Addressing the poisonous legacies of Rwanda’s genocide is the only way to avert future tragedy, and it is the best way to honor Rwanda’s dead.”

Pictures of victims at the Gisozi Genocide Memorial in Kigali in 2004.Credit...Radu Sigheti/Reuters

Rwanda genocide survivor: 'Not every Hutu wanted us dead' By Jessie Gretener, CNN Updated 11:19 AM ET, Fri April 12, 2019 Genocide survivor: I was too young to be widowed 13:42

London (CNN)Nine-months pregnant and hiding under a bed, soaked in blood from her murdered relatives, Denise Uwimana's waters broke. She had no safe place to give birth. Her eldest son whispered, "Mama, is this the end of the world?"

While a quarter of a century has passed since the Rwanda genocide, it feels like yesterday for survivors.

"I breathed in the blood," Uwimana told CNN's Christiane Amanpour in an interview airing Friday.

It was April 16th, 1994. Ten days earlier, President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane was shot down, ending the

cease-fire in Rwanda's civil war and igniting 100 days of slaughter.

Hutu extremists targeted the minority ethnic Tutsis and other moderate Hutus, murdering between 800,000 and

a million people, with clubs, machetes, and their bare hands. Neighbors turned on neighbors. Husbands turned

on wives. Churches became abattoirs and schools became graveyards. Not even the young were spared.

'Angels sent from God' "Not every Hutu wanted us dead" Uwimana wrote in her memoir 'From Red Earth,', "I knew my children and I

would have been dead many times over, had it not been for my few Hutu friends watching over us."

Uwimana says she gave birth under the protection of a Hutu neighbor. Cutting the umbilical cord with a dirty

knife, her Hutu friend pleaded with the Hutu mayor to let them take Uwimana and her children to the village's

health clinic. The clinic became a refuge for Tutsis, with Hutu friends bringing them food, warning of danger,

and taking Uwimana's baby to get vaccinated.

"I had unexpected support from Hutus," she told Amanpour. "Some of my neighbors whom I did not expect that

they [would be] the ones to support me."

"They were like angels sent from God."

'I don't know where they put him' Uwimana's newborn son -- now celebrating his 25th birthday - never met his father, Charles, who was not with

the family during the time of the attack.

"I know he was killed by the Hutu militias, but I don't know where they put him."

"This is still a trauma for us."

Asked if she ever expected to be widowed at 29 years old, Uwimana replied, "never."

"I was dreaming of many good things with my husband. So suddenly, all were cut."

The last time she saw her husband was on April 5th, 1994.

"He just embraced me, he told me I love you, and he went."

'I told God: You disappoint me' On Uwimana's mother's side, most of her relatives were killed in their place of worship. A number of churches

became scenes of mass killings during the genocide, set alight with hundreds locked inside.

Over 90% of Rwanda is Christian, the majority Catholic. Hundreds of hundreds of priests and nuns were killed

in the genocide. But others were active participants. In 2017, Pope Francis apologized for the "sins and failings

of the church and its members" during the genocide. Several priests and nuns have been charged for their

actions during the genocide.

Uwimana, a Protestant, described her struggle with faith as a deep trauma.

"I could not believe that people who believed [in] God, who were called Christians, were involved, directly or

indirectly," Uwimana said. "I told God "You disappointed me."

'Rwanda is a family again' Yet it was her faith that forged her journey of forgiveness. Uwimana found strength in a bible: a need to end the

hate to find peace.

"[I had to] give chance [to] these Hutu people who killed, so that they recognize that they have done bad."

Since the genocide, Uwimana has dedicated herself to protesting any implication that any person or group is

less human than another. She founded Iriba Shalom International, a non-profit helping genocide survivors find

forgiveness and reconciliation.

On Sunday, at a memorial marking the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, President Paul Kagame

reflected on such reconciliation "in 1994, there was no hope, only darkness, Today, light radiates from this

place... Rwanda became a family once again."