HISTORY

Rwanda: the origins of the Tutsi genocide

On April 7, 1994, one of the biggest killings of the twentieth century began on the green hills of Rwanda. It was not yet another African inter-ethnic war, but a planned extermination that cost the lives of nearly 1 million people. It was indeed a “genocide” responding to the political project of the extremist Hutu power: to eliminate all Tutsis.

Around 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

By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

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Between April and July 1994, in the space of one hundred days, nearly a million Rwandans were killed. Most of the victims belonged to the Tutsi minority, while the perpetrators of this veritable extermination enterprise were the Hutus, the majority community, who have exercised power in Rwanda since 1962. Several thousand moderate Hutus who did not adhere to the racist ideology of their leaders, also died in this bloodbath, the twenty-eighth anniversary of which the country of a thousand hills is commemorating this year.

Commemoration ceremonies take place in Kigali. Twenty-eight years later, despite the work done by historians and local and international judicial investigators, the scale and circumstances of these massacres continue to arouse astonishment and questions. One of the main questions concerns the attack which targeted the plane bringing back to the country the Hutu president of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, on April 6, 1994. Considered to be the signal for the start of the genocide, this explosion, which cost the lives of the president and members of the crew of the Presidential Falcon, has not been elucidated to this day.

Parisian judge Jean-Louis Brugière, who led the first investigation into this attack, accused those close to current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who led the Tutsi rebels at the time, 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, it was the ideal pretext to implement their plan to exterminate the Tutsis. The report of the ballistic expertise carried out at the request of judge Marc Trévidic, who is now investigating the case, would invalidate the thesis put forward by Brugière. It 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.

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To (re)read:

Attack against Habyarimana's plane: the twists and turns of the investigation

Whatever the case, the attack of April 6 nonetheless marks a turning point in contemporary Rwandan history. As soon as news of the president's death became known, Hutu extremists took to the streets, calling on the population to exterminate the Tutsis to avenge the deceased president. The military close to the extremists immediately took power. They first got rid of the moderate Hutus who opposed their murderous project, 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 did not stop until three months later.

Victims of history

At the time of the events, these killings appeared in the eyes of the international media to spontaneous “

popular anger

” after the attack which 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 an entire part of the population, in a context of racialized management of Rwandan society since the colonization.

Originally, Tutsis and Hutus constituted one and the same people. As Jean-Pierre Chrétien, a leading specialist in Great Lakes Africa, writes, “ 

everyone speaks a single language, Kinyrwanda, and shares the same beliefs, the same culture, the same clans and a common history for centuries. centuries 

”. It was the colonizing powers, the Germans and then the Belgians, nourished by Gobineau's thoughts on racial inequality, who made the Tutsis and the Hutus two different ethnic groups. The settlers favored the Tutsis, described as “

black Europeans

” and judged to be of superior intelligence, to the detriment of the Hutus described as “Bantu Negroes”, reduced to their condition of farmers. Tutsis had priority in access to missionary schools and in recruitment for administrative jobs.

Needless to say, the Hutus experienced their relegation as an injustice. They brought their resentments out into the open at the end of the 1950s, under the mask of pro-independence demands which then spread throughout 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 that the Tutsis had enjoyed until then. Even more serious, the latter now become 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 which resulted in massacres of Tutsis. Several thousand Tutsis were 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. Forbidden to return to their native country, these exiles organized themselves in Uganda and created the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in 1987.

The genocidal spiral

On October 1, 1990, the FPR launched its first offensive on Rwanda. It is the start of the civil war. President Juvénal Habyarimana, who took power in Kigali in 1973 through a putsch, used this attack as a pretext to perpetrate abuses against the Tutsis of the interior, accused of complicity with the RPF rebels. The ethnic quotas which 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 government relies on the media, notably the fortnightly newspaper 

Kangura 

and the famous Free Radio and Television of Mille Collines to distil throughout the country the ideology of hatred which will be the main source of the genocide. The Tutsis were described as “

cockroaches

” (

inyenzi

) by the radical press, which did not hesitate to mention the machete as a response to the Tutsi question in 1991.

Last but not least

, the Interahamwe militia (“

those who fight together

” 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 were drawn up by the Rwandan authorities at the time. Then the armed arms of the administration, the Interahamwe Hutu militias and the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), came into action. They set up roadblocks and search houses. Men, women and children are exterminated with machetes, torn to pieces by grenades and shells, in the street, in their homes and sometimes in the very 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 numbered 200,000 inhabitants, was exterminated.

It did not take more than ten days for the massacres to spread across the entire country. The new government from the “ 

Hutu Power 

” movement, which took power in the hours following the disappearance of President Habyarimana, immediately relayed its murderous slogan to the local authorities. In the depths of the country, due to a lack of militiamen, civilians are mobilized by the authorities as well as the media in the pay of those in power. We pay them, we threaten them to push them to participate in the massacres of their neighbors, their colleagues and sometimes their parents.

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

 The scale, circumstances and simultaneity of the massacres leave no doubt about their meticulous preparation

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

Le Genocide au village

(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). The judges of the ICTR described the massacres in Rwanda as " 

genocide

 " from their first judgment pronounced in September 1998, placing them legally on the same level as the Armenian genocide of 1915-16 and the genocide of Jews and Gypsies committed by the Nazis during World War II. 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 “

in whole or in part, a national, ethnic or religious group

” .

This legal recognition of the suffering of Rwandans is important, but despite this recognition, many survivors of the 1994 genocide must wonder in this time of commemorations why the international community did not intervene in Rwanda when there was still time to stop the bloodbath? The Blue Helmets deployed from October 1993 as part of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (MINUAR) to help implement the Arusha agreements between the RPF and the Rwandan government, could not ignore the reality systematic massacres triggered by the deadly attack against President Habyarimana.

In Kigali, the United Nations is in the hot seat for having cut off 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 from the Belgian Senate looked into this subject - oh so much! - thorny. In France, in the absence of a commission of inquiry, a parliamentary information mission is responsible for shedding light on the causes and context of the Tutsi genocide. In 1998, his spokesperson rejected France's direct responsibility for the genocide, while pointing out the too close proximity of the French government of the time to the Habyarimana regime and its army. But as the new accusations made by Paul Kagame, emphasizing France's role in the genocide, demonstrate, twenty years after the genocide, the wounds have not always healed.

Article originally published on 04/06/2014.

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 RFI sound archives

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

• To read :

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

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

• To see: 

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

• To consult: 

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

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