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Rwanda History
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Who was involved in the genocide?
The Hutus and the Tutsis were the two tribes involved in the Rwandan genocide. These two tribes are the two largest in the Rwandan region. According to the United States Central Intelligence Agency statistics show that 11.5 million (84%) of Rwandans are Hutu, while less than 1.5 million Rwandans are Tutsi.
What was the cause of the genocide?
The historical background for the conflict is a long and complicated story that started many years earlier. Some Western countries (the former colony power of Belgium in particular) had a more direct part of the responsibility for the dangerous development. Originally there were no direct conflicts between the Hutu and Tutsi people in Rwanda, but in 1935 the Belgium colonial rule forced everybody to carry papers identifying them as belonging to one of the groups. They created a class system featuring a minority Tutsi upper class and lower classes of Hutus and Tutsi commoners. However, in 1926 the Belgians abolished the local posts of "land-chief", "cattle-chief" and "military chief," and in doing so they stripped the Hutu of their limited local power over land.
The genocide had been carefully planned and the start signal was given when the president of Rwanda and the second newly elected president of Burundi (also a Hutu) were shot down in his plane on April 6 1994. Still today it is not clear whether the plane was shot down by Tutsi rebels or by forces within the Hutu rule that didn't agree with the moderate president. In response to the April killing of the two presidents, over the next three months (April - July 1994) the Hutu-led military and Interahamwe militia groups killed about 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates in the Rwandan genocide.
What are the after effects of the genocide?
A 1999 UNICEF study found that 96 percent of Rwandan children had witnessed the 1994 massacres. 80 percent had lost at least one family member. Hundreds of thousands were orphaned. Since 1994, AIDS has left thousands more orphaned, in what humanitarian workers have called "Rwanda's silent genocide." Survivors and witnesses say that Hutu extremists routinely used mass rape as a weapon, hastening the spread of AIDS. Today one in nine Rwandans is HIV-positive. As parents continue to die, the "wealth and pride" of many Rwandan families are left to wander the streets of the towns.