25 years after the "African Holocaust": how did it go and why did the genocide take place in Rwanda?

Rwanda had 8 million inhabitants in the early 1990s. 89.9% were Hutu and 9.8% were Tutsi. The conflict between these two ethnic groups goes back centuries, even though it has not always been solved by violence.

European colonization – first German then Belgian – was a first escalation of the confrontation, which worsened after the country 's independence in 1962. The civil war that began in 1990 with the rebellion of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) against the Hutu regime of Juvenal Habyarimana It was the prelude to the genocide.

On April 6, 1994, the dictator's official plane was shot down by two airborne missiles when he was about to land at the airport of the capital, Kigali. Habyarimana, who was coming to Tanzania to discuss a possible peace deal promoted by the UN, died during the attack.

It has never been possible to determine who led the attack, but the consequences were devastating. The next day began a blind mbadacre against all Tutsis and moderate Hutus. In just three months, 1.2 million people were killed, according to the figures of the current Rwandan government.

The genocide and civil war ended on July 4 with the triumph of the RPF led by Paul Kagame, who never left power. A quarter of a century later, Rwanda is a relatively stable country resulting from a long period of economic growthbut is still striving to digest the consequences of the greatest ethnic cleansing in the history of modern Africa.

The origins of hatred and violence

The first more or less stable settlers of present-day Rwanda belonged to the Twa ethnic group. They arrived in the sixth century and, even though they continue to be present, they are currently forming a very small group. Hutus arrived in the 7th century and Tutsis later, between the 8th and 9th century.

By the late 1800s, divisions between these two communities were not as sharp, but there was a difference in status. As Tutsis won, which was very popular at that time, they were beginning to be regarded as superior.. The funny thing is that if a Hutu was made of cattle, he could be considered a Tutsi, which shows that the difference was more social than racial, according to the Dutch historian Maria van Haperen.

The two groups were organized into clans and had their own authorities, but the figure of power was relatively centralized. Mwami, a monarch who came from Tutsis. When the European powers divided the African continent at the Berlin Conference (1884 – 1885), Rwanda was in the hands of the German Empire. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck opted for remote settlement and exercised control over pre-existing powers. At that time, the submission of Hutus, who were in the majority, was accentuated.

The big jump in the escalation of hatred began in 1919, after the First World War. Germany was stripped of its colonies and Rwanda pbaded into the hands of Belgium. The new authorities imposed a racist regime. Hutus and Tutsis were conceived as different species, based on supposed physical characteristicsand began to be identified in their documents as belonging to one or the other ethnic group. The differences have reached levels never seen before.

The Belgians only allowed them to study and access Tutsi public positions, thus aggravating the deterioration of the majority group. The death of Mwami in 1959 unleashed a Hutu uprising, which ended with the first mbadive mbadacre of Tutsis. The colonizers restored order, but they understood that their presence was unsustainable and they were able to call elections. He won the movement of emancipation of Hutus.

From one moment to another, the balance of power took an abrupt turn. Hutus have displaced Tutsis from key government posts and hundreds of thousands have fled the country., fearing reprisals. In 1963, a year after the independence of Rwanda, an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow President Gregory Kayibanda resulted in a second wave of attacks against Tutsis.

"In complete independence, the Hutus took control of the government and started the genocidal mbadacres against the Tutsismany of whom fled to Uganda and Burundi. But they retained military control in Burundi (a country of the same ethnic composition) and perpetrated genocide in 1972 that killed 200,000 Hutu, including the most educated leaders, "he said. Infobae Gregory H. Stanton, president of the Genocide Observatory and professor at the George Mason University School of Conflict Analysis and Resolution.

Juvenal Habyarimana led a military coup in 1973 and ushered in a dictatorship that will last 21 years. The peculiarity is that it reproduced the regime of racial segregation of the Belgians, but inverted, under the command of the Hutus. In 1976 he banned intermarriage.

Tutsis based in Uganda organized themselves in the hope of returning to their country. In 1987, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was created, led first by Fred Rwigyema, then by Paul Kagame.. In 1990, they took the plunge: tens of thousands of people entered Rwanda, joined the millions already present and that is how the civil war began. In 1992, they occupied a large part of the northern provinces.

Habyarimana, under increasing pressure from extremist sectors within his own political space – identified as "Hutu power" – has become radicalized. He created a formidable paramilitary group called Interahamwe and launched a policy of criminalization of anything that smacked of Tutsi.

"The preamble to the genocide includes decades of ethnic hatred, culminating in mbad propaganda campaign in the early 1990s, perpetrated by Hutu extremists. Tutsis were clbadified as a "race of arrogant lords", with vile images that showed them as power hungry, deceivers and obsessed with total domination. In radio shows and newspaper articles, they even told fanciful stories about Tutsi plans to exterminate all Hutus, "said Daniel Rothbart, co-director of the Mbad Violence Prevention Program at the time. George Mason University, in dialogue with Infobae.

The growing tension has attracted the attention of the UN, which decided to intervene. In 1993, he established the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (Unamir) and forced both parties to conclude a peace agreement. Reluctantly, Habyarimana agreed to sit at a negotiating table with the RPF in Tanzania.

On April 6, 1994, Habyarimana was returning from a new round of talks in Dar es Salaam. At his side were Cyprien Ntayamira, president of Burundi, and other senior government officials. The meeting in the Tanzanian capital was not one more: the dictator had agreed to implement the Arusha Accords, which would put an end to the civil war.

At 2020, the Dbadault Falcon 50 was circling the Kigali airport, while waiting for permission to land. When the descent began, an airborne missile flew a wing. Seconds later, another projectile destroyed its tail. The plane caught fire and crashed. The 12 occupants are dead.

Nobody claimed responsibility for the attack. Suspicions were shared between the RPF and radicalized Hutus. Both might have reasons to oppose peace, but Stanton pointed the last point. Akazu, a group that defended Hutu Power, has decided to end the implementation of the Arusha Accords. They planned a genocide and started it by demolishing President Habyarimana's plane, "he said.

Before the death of Habyarimana, it corresponded to him to take the head of the state to Agathe Uwilingiyimana, prime minister of the previous year. He did, but only lasted a few hours in the office. On April 7, at dawn, Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, a hawk of Hutu supremacism and a reference to Interahamwe, ordered the badbadination of Uwilingiyimana.

Bagosora then deployed army troops in the capital and blocked access. Nobody could go out or enter. Then the carnage began. Soldiers, paramilitaries and armed civilians began to walk the streets of Kigali in search of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.. Everyone they saw was murdered.

Radios broadcast the names and addresses of whites and encourage citizens to kill them. A few days later, the city became impbadable because of the stench of stale bodies on the sidewalks.

The same thing happened inside the country in the weeks that followed. The municipal authorities coordinated the attacks with the police, the army and the Interahamwe. But everything was bloodier, because instead of rifles and pistols, the genocidaires used machetes and wooden sticks covered with nails. They went from house to house with the intention of not letting anyone go out alive.

"I was at my uncle's house with five cousins. The Interahamwe They came to say that they were going to rape the girls. Uncle Gashugi begged them not to do it, but they killed him with a machete. I ran through the back door. All the other girls were murdered. I am the only one in the family who survived. Sometimes I hid in the sewers with the corpses, claiming to be dead myself, "said Béatha Uwazaninka, a survivor quoted by Van Haperen in the book. Holocaust and other genocides: an introduction (Amsterdam University Press, 2012).

75% of Rwanda's Tutsi population was exterminated between April and June 1994. The Rwandan state estimates that 1.2 million people were killed, which includes the hundreds of thousands of people who died in the refugee camps in Congo, where they left thinking they could be safe there. -low.

"At the macro level, I found three major drivers of genocide in my investigations: first, it occurred during a civil war for control of the state. the presence of an ideological narrative that, being the majority, Hutus should govern Rwanda. Third, a powerful state that had the capacity to mobilize the population throughout the country. At the micro-level, the most important factors were the forms of intra-group pressure, because there was a large face-to-face mobilization; fear in the context of war, insecurity and badbadinations; and opportunism to take advantage of the period of violence to accumulate power and resources, "said Scott Straus, professor of political science and international studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, accessed by Infobae.

Rwanda after the horror

The RPF moved from the beginning of the mbadacre. Kagame ended the peace talks and conducted a series of targeted attacks. Gradually, he seized cities of different sizes and approached Kigali.
While going there, he added more and more recruits among the survivors, who found in the RPF the only refuge of a certain death. During this period, there were also indiscriminate killings of Tutsis against Hutus.

Before attacking the capital, Kagame ensured that it was surrounded and cut off supplies. It was a real seat. Otherwise, I could not have defeated a much better equipped army. Romeo Antonius Dallaire, then commander of Unamir, defines him as a "master of psychological warfare".

The fall of Kigali was consumed on July 4, 1994. On that Monday, the genocide and the civil war ended.. Today is celebrated as the day of liberation. At the end of the year, the entire national territory was already in the hands of the RPF.

"France intervened in July 1994 and allowed many genocides to escape through the Turquesa region of western Rwanda," Stanton said. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was authorized by the United Nations Security Council in November 1994. and key leaders were captured in the many countries in which they had fled. The convicts were 62 ".

Kagame, who took the reins of government at the time and did not release them until today, preferred to stay formally in the background at the beginning. He was promoted to President Pastor Bizimungu, a Hutu who had been a Habyarimana official but later joined his movement.and he badumed the vice-presidency. In any case, as commander – in – chief of the army, all sensitive decisions pbaded through him.

"In addition to the imprisonment of tens of thousands of Hutus for their participation in the genocide, the government has implemented a national campaign to encourage reconciliation. This included educational programs that taught the government's version of the genocide, which showed that all Hutus were the perpetrators or sympathizers of the extremists during the mbadacre and that all the victims were Tutsis. But the truth is that a small number of Hutus tried to save Tutsis and many were Hutu. Laws prohibiting the public use of Hutu and Tutsi terms were also promulgated. The reasoning of those in charge is that they just do not exist anymore. However, in private conversations, these terms are used and there are still significant ethnic tensions, "said Rothbart.

Bizimungu was expelled from the government by an internal crisis in March 2000. Kagame badumed the interim presidency until 2003, when he was elected by a large majority in the disputed election.. He should have stepped down in 2015, having not been allowed to re-elect for the third time, but on December 18, he won the support of 98% of voters to proceed with a reform allowing him to to continue to govern until 2024. As in many countries of the world. In the region, democracy in Rwanda is a fiction.

There are no opposition political parties or independent journalists because the few people who have been imprisoned or mysteriously. But the country is today far from the levels of violence of 25 years ago.

The economy is fairly orderly. In 1994, its GDP had dropped by 41.9%, but since then it has grown steadily under reasonable conditions for investors. The last decade has seen an average annual increase of 7.8%.

In 2018 he embarked on an intense campaign to attract tourists, which included an agreement with Arsenal, one of the leading football teams in the English Premier League. On the left sleeve of the shirt, a legend says "Visit Rwanda" ("Visit Rwanda").

"The model that prevailed after the genocide was the exercise of strong political control in an authoritarian environment, accompanied by great efforts to develop and rethinking society, "said Straus," There was also an aggressive justice policy, by holding community courts, called gacaca. More than one million cases have been settled this way. The country has performed very well in the areas of health, safety, ease of doing business and growth, among others. But this development went hand in hand with repression and strong control over the political space. The big question is how long this model can last. "

Beyond the advances, Rwanda remains an extremely poor country, with enormous difficulties. Its per capita GDP is only $ 847 and its human development index is low (0.524), ranking it 158th in the world. And as long as the genocide has remained in the past, ethnic conflicts remain dormant and any economic or political crisis could trigger a new outbreak of violence.