STORY

Rwanda: the origins of the genocide

About 160,000 Rwandan refugees form an improvised camp, 10 km north of the border town of Goma, in eastern Zaire, on July 17, 1994. © Pascal Guyot / AFP

Text by: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

9 mins

Twenty-eight years ago began on the green hills of Rwanda one of the greatest massacres of the twentieth century.

It was not yet another inter-ethnic African war, but a planned extermination which claimed the lives of nearly 1 million people.

It was indeed a "genocide" responding to the political project of the Hutu extremist power: to eliminate all Tutsis.

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Between April and July 1994, in the space of one hundred days, nearly one million Rwandans were killed.

Most of the victims belonged to the Tutsi minority, while the perpetrators of this veritable enterprise of extermination were the Hutus, the majority community, which has exercised power in Rwanda since 1962. Several thousand moderate Hutus who did not adhere to the racist ideology of their leaders, have also died in this bloodbath, the twenty-eighth anniversary of which the land of a thousand hills commemorates this year.

Commemoration ceremonies take place in Kigali.

Twenty-eight years later, despite the work done by local and international historians and legal investigators, the scale and circumstances of these massacres continue to arouse astonishment and questioning.

One of the main questions concerns the April 6, 1994 attack on the plane bringing the Hutu president of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, back to the country.

Considered as the signal for the outbreak of the genocide, this explosion, which cost the life of the president and the members of the crew of the presidential Falcon, has not been elucidated to date.

Parisian judge Jean-Louis Brugière, who led the first investigation into this attack, accused the relatives of the current president of Rwanda Paul Kagame, at the head at the time of the Tutsi rebels, of having perpetrated the attack. .

Kagame obviously rejected the accusation and pointed the finger, in turn, at the Hutu extremists for whom, according to him, this was the ideal pretext to implement their plan of extermination of the Tutsis.

The report of the ballistics expertise carried out at the request of judge Marc Trévidic, who is now investigating the case, would invalidate the thesis put forward by Brugière.

He indicates that the missiles were fired from the top of Kanombe hill, then occupied by the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), but without concluding on the identity of the perpetrators of the attack.

►

Be that as it may, the April 6 attack nonetheless marks a turning point in contemporary Rwandan history.

As soon as the news of the president's death was known, Hutu extremists took to the streets, calling on the population to exterminate the Tutsis to avenge the missing president.

The soldiers close to the extremists took power in stride.

They first got rid of the moderate Hutus who opposed their murderous plan, before launching a national campaign of massacres.

The violence first affected the capital, which became the epicenter of the ongoing genocide, before spreading throughout the country.

The killings will not stop until three months later.

Victims of history

At the time of the events, these killings resembled, in the eyes of the international media, the spontaneous "

" after the attack which had cost the life of President Habyarimana.

We know today that, far from being a sudden and unpredictable explosion, the massacre of the Tutsis was indeed a genocide, the planned elimination of a whole section of the population, in a context of racialized management of Rwandan society since the colonization.

Originally, Tutsis and Hutus were one and the same people.

As Jean-Pierre Chrétien, a great specialist in the Africa of the Great Lakes, writes, " 

”.

It was the colonizing powers, the Germans and then the Belgians, nourished by Gobineau's thought on the inequality of races, which made Tutsis and Hutus two different ethnic groups.

Settlers favor Tutsis, described as "

» and judged to be of superior intelligence, to the detriment of the Hutus qualified as « Bantu Negroes », reduced to their condition of farmers.

Tutsis were given priority in access to missionary schools and in recruitment for administrative jobs.

Needless to say that the Hutus experienced their relegation as an injustice.

They brought their resentment to light at the end of the 1950s, under the mask of pro-independence demands which then spread to all of Africa.

When the Belgians finally withdrew from Rwanda in 1962, power passed into the hands of the Hutus, the majority in the country (85% of the population).

This is the end of the privileges enjoyed by Tutsis until then.

Worse still, the latter are now becoming the scapegoats for the repeated crises that the new Rwandan republic is going through.

From 1959, Rwanda was the scene of regular outbreaks of violence that resulted in the massacres of Tutsis.

Several thousand Tutsis are displaced in camps.

Others flee to neighboring countries (Uganda, Congo, Burundi, Tanzania).

Nearly half of Rwandan Tutsis had to go into exile between 1960 and 1973 after several periods of massacres and discrimination.

Prohibited from returning to their native country, these exiles organized themselves in Uganda and in 1987 created the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).

The genocidal spiral

On October 1, 1990, the RPF launched its first offensive on Rwanda.

It is the beginning of the civil war.

President Juvénal Habyarimana, who took power in Kigali in 1973 in a putsch, uses this attack as a pretext to perpetrate abuses against Tutsis from the interior, accused of complicity with the RPF rebels.

The ethnic quotas that have existed since independence limiting the presence of Tutsis in schools and jobs to 9% are reinforced.

The government is also introducing identity cards indicating membership of the ethnic group.

At the same time, the authorities relied on the media, in particular the bi-monthly newspaper 

and the famous Free Radio-Television of the Thousand Hills to distill across the country the ideology of hatred which was to be the mainspring of the genocide.

The Tutsis are qualified as “

” (

) by the radical press which does not hesitate to evoke from 1991 the machete as an answer to the Tutsi question.

, the Interahamwe militia (“

”, in Kinyarwanda) was founded in 1992, experienced in the exercise of violence.

The genocidal bomb is in place.

The crash of the Hutu President's Falcon on April 6, 1994 will serve as a lighter to light the fuse.

Massacres

The day after the explosion, large-scale massacres began.

We kill with method and application.

Lists of people to be killed are drawn up by the Rwandan authorities of the time.

Then came into action the armed arms of the administration, the Hutu Interahamwe militias and the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR).

They set up roadblocks, search houses.

Men, women and children were exterminated with machetes, torn to pieces by grenades and shells, in the streets, in their homes and sometimes even within the churches and schools where they had taken refuge.

Such scenes are repeated all over Kigali.

In the space of a month, a quarter of the population of the capital, which then had 200,000 inhabitants, was exterminated.

It does not take more than ten days for the massacres to spread to the whole country.

The new government resulting from the “ 

” movement, which took power in the hours following the death of President Habyarimana, relayed its murderous slogan to the local authorities without delay.

In the depths of the country, for lack of militiamen, civilians are mobilized by the authorities as well as the media in the pay of power.

We reward them, we threaten them to push them to participate in the massacres of their neighbours, their colleagues and sometimes their parents.

With an average of 10,000 deaths per day, the killings that bloodied the Rwandan hills and marshes in the spring of 1994 constitute one of the greatest crimes in the history of the 20th century.

“

 ,” writes Hélène Dumas, author of a recent highly acclaimed book on the massacres, entitled

(Seuil).

The role of the international community

The killings in Rwanda ended on July 4, 1994, with the capture of Kigali by the RPF rebels led by Paul Kagame, who had become president.

Since this liberation, the international community has reinvested in the country, notably with the creation by the UN of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).

ICTR judges have called the massacres in Rwanda a " 

 from their first judgment delivered in September 1998, placing them on a legal level on the same level as the Armenian genocide of 1915-16 and the genocide of the Jews and the Gypsies committed by the Nazis during the Second World War.

Remember that according to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the United Nations in 1948, genocide is a criminal act perpetrated with the aim of destroying "

" .

.

This legal recognition of the suffering of Rwandans is important, but despite this recognition, many survivors of the 1994 genocide must wonder at this time of commemoration why the international community did not intervene in Rwanda when there was still time to stop the bloodbath?

The peacekeepers deployed in October 1993 within the framework of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (Minuar) to help implement the Arusha Accords between the RPF and the Rwandan government, could not ignore the reality systematic massacres triggered by the murderous attack on President Habyarimana.

In Kigali, the United Nations are in the hot seat for having amputated the UNAMIR of almost all of its troops from the start of the events.

Belgium, but especially France, are in the hot seat for their friendship with the Hutu regime.

In 1997, a commission of inquiry of the Belgian Senate looked into this subject - oh how much!

- prickly.

In France, for lack of the establishment of a commission of inquiry, it is a parliamentary information mission which is responsible for shedding light on the causes and the context of the Tutsi genocide.

In 1998, his spokesperson rejected France's direct responsibility for the genocide, while pointing out the excessive closeness of the French government at the time to the Habyarimana regime and its army.

But like the new accusations made by Paul Kagame,

Article originally published on 06/04/2014.

Our selection on the subject:

• To listen :

→ Rwanda: the archives of the association of survivors of the Tutsi Ibuka genocide digitized

→ Rwanda, in the name of racism (1/2)

→ Why did France let the Rwandan genocidaires flee in July 1994?

→ Rwanda: the genocide in the sound archives of RFI

→ The genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda: an infernal cycle

• To read :

→ The Duclert report, an important step in the normalization between France and Rwanda

→ Genocide in Rwanda: a new report commissioned by Kigali examines the role of France

• To watch: 

[Video] April 7 – July 4, 1994: the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda

• To consult: 

France 24 infographic: Rwanda 20 years later: portraits of change

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