No Secret: The Rwandan Genocide

A remote source of the Nile, the Kagera River originates in Burundi. On its way to Lake Victoria it flows into a steep gorge along the natural border between Rwanda and Tanzania. Before entering the ravine, the river cascades in a small waterfall that swells in the rainy season. As the Kagera sweeps down from the highlands it carries within its currents vast clusters of uprooted trees embedded in gigantic dollops of elephant grass. In the spring and summer of 1994 it was still much the same. However, this time also thousands of human corpses floated on the river. Rwanda and Burundi are two tiny African countries, each with a territory somewhat smaller than Belgium. Most of the population belong to Hutu tribes, who are traditionally crop growers. But beginning in the 1300s warrior herdsmen from the highlands of Ethiopia migrated to the region. They originally spoke Somali or Oromo, but in adopting the local Bantu language and settling among the Hutus, they became known as Tutsis. The German colonists favoured the Ethiopian look of the Tutsi minority. They employed them as overseers in the administration of Ruanda-Urundi, as the colony was called then. Then during the First World War Belgium took over governing the territory but continued to support the Tutsis as the ruling class. In 1919 Brussels received a mandate from the League of Nations to administer the colony. The Belgian colonists divided Tutsis and Hutus on the basis of cattle ownership, church documents, physical measurements and physiognomic appearance. Basically, they had designated the wealthy and tall as Tutsis, and classified those poorer and shorter as Hutus. The Tutsis got used fast to their privileged status as Rwandan aristocrats. They worshipped their king as a god-like ruler and treated the Hutus with disdain as peasants. But the aristocratic Tutsi monarchy came to an end in 1959 when Belgium allowed holding universal elections. King Kigeli V of Ruanda-Urundi was forced to go to exile and the majority Hutus assumed control of the government. These were turbulent times that deteriorated into wide spread communal violence. In 1962 two independent countries emerged from the former colony, Rwanda and Burundi. But the transition from colony to independence was not a peaceful one. At the time that Rwanda became independent, Hutus comprised more than 80 percent of the country’s seven million people. Nevertheless, the Tutsi minority was reluctant to give up its privileged ruling status. Consequently, Hutus and Tutsis were at each other’s throat in the power struggle for governing the country. In Rwanda hundreds of Tutsis were killed while thousands of others fled to neighbouring Burundi and Uganda. In the aftermath of the atrocities, President Grégoire Kayibanda made the Hutus the governing majority of the nation. Yet the leaders of the new regime did not choose a policy of national reconciliation. Instead, they opted for oppression and discrimination. They blamed the problems of Rwanda on the Tutsis. In the 1970s the Hutu-led military continued to murder Tutsis in Rwanda. They excluded the Tutsis from the governmental administration, the armed forces, even from schools and universities. Yet meanwhile Tutsis had their share in violent ethnic cleansing as well. In 1972, in response to a Hutu rebellion, the Tutsi controlled army in the Republic of Burundi killed over 100,000 Hutus. Similarly to Rwanda, over 80 percent of the population in Burundi consists of Hutu tribes. Harking back on the shame and humiliation of the past, the Hutu leadership in Rwanda intensified their hateful propaganda, inflaming bitterness and hostility against the tall, aristocratic Tutsi. They claimed that the Tutsis intended to restore a feudal system to enslave the Hutu population. They recruited writers and teachers to travel the country to raise Hutu pride and to create a pan-Hutu consciousness. They sowed the seeds of spite, unfurled the propaganda of hate and prepared the hurricane of genocide. However, in the neighbouring countries the Tutsi refugee Diaspora organized militia forces to overthrow the Hutu regime in Rwanda. In 1990 civil war broke out as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) of the Tutsi minority invaded the country from Uganda. Then on April 6,1994, an airplane carrying the Hutu presidents of two African nations, Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi, had been shot down. The fanatic Akazu organization of the Hutu Power ideologists immediately blamed the Tutsis for the shooting down of the plane. They spread hate and hysteria. By radio and word of mouth they told Hutu civilians that it was their patriotic duty to “fill the half-empty graves” with the bodies of Tutsis. They called for the slaughter of all Tutsis, as well as of Hutus who sympathized with the Tutsi. They even incited Hutu wives and husbands to murder their own spouses. Although throughout the centuries both Hutus and Tutsis unleashed violent actions and slaughtered each other, the tragic events of 1994 culminated in one of the most horrible atrocities of history. The Rwandan radio exhorted people to fight for Rwanda and to kill the Tutsis like ‘cockroaches’ and sweep them from the country. The radio inflamed the Hutus to massacre the Tutsis, urging them to use every kind of weapons; if not guns and grenades, then arrows, spears, machetes, knives and clubs. And so they did. Frenzied Hutu squads killed Tutsi men, women, children and babies by the thousands in the streets, in churches, schools and in their houses. In the countryside the murderers covered the dead with banana leaves in order to screen them from aerial photography. In about100 days, between April 6 and mid-July in 1994, approximately one million people were killed. The victims also included Hutus who refused to participate in the massacres or were on friendly relations with Tutsis. The cold blooded murderers who perpetrated these heinous crimes were fuelled by fanatic dedication to a pan-nationalist identity politics. The killers were often not strangers but familiar faces to the victims, neighbours and workmates, even relatives or former friends. The December 1993 issue of the Hutu Kangura magazine shows a picture of the Rwandan President Grégoire Kayibanda next to a machete. Adjacent to the picture appear the words: “Tutsi: Race of God”, and then the magazine poses the question: “Which weapons are we going to use to beat the cockroaches for good? ” The genocide that followed was no secret! It occurred uninterrupted by United Nations forces that were in place monitoring a ceasefire. And journalists and TV cameras from all over the world reported the massacres. Viewers in cities and villages on different continents sat in front of their television screens, sipping coffee or eating popcorn, and watched in shock the horrible mass murders. The genocide ended in July 1994 when the Tutsi rebels of the RPF defeated the Hutu military forces of Rwanda. Fearing retributions, two million Hutus fled to neighbouring Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zaire. Many of them participated in the massacres. Conditions in the refugee camps were dreadful and thousands died in epidemics of cholera and dysentery. The international community could have intervened in order to stop the Rwandan genocide, but governments lacked the political will to do that. And, indeed, the United Nations Security Council accepted responsibility for failing to prevent the massacres. The unchecked brutality of the perpetrators of this genocide “made a mockery, once again, of the pledge ‘never again’”, said the Canadian Foreign Minister, Lloyd Axworthy. He was referring to the promise made after the Holocaust.