What is the cause of the conflict between Hutus and Tutsis?
From April 7 through mid-July 1994, the Rwandan government conducted a systematic campaign of elimination against civilians whom it considered to be national “enemies.” At least 800,000 people were killed in massacres carried out across the country. Initially, the targets of this execution were existing or potential political opponents of the government, particularly prominent members of opposition parties and their families, referred to as “political enemies.”
Following that, the ethnically Hutu-dominated administration stigmatized all members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group, regardless of age, gender, or ideas, as “historical foes.” The killing, which began in Kigali and then spread into a government-directed nationwide genocide, occurred in the presence of international witnesses, including diplomats, aid workers, and even United Nations (UN) peacekeeping troops, who failed to prevent it, despite numerous warning signals, and who failed to stop it once it was underway.
The context in which “enemies” were identified and plans to exterminate them came together was one of intense international pressure on Rwanda’s authoritarian single-party regime to “open up” to multiparty democracy and negotiate with an armed group of refugees who had attacked from neighboring Uganda and declared their right to return. These two previously independent developments appeared almost simultaneously in late 1990. Over the next four years, the two became inexorably linked in the “official” rhetoric of Rwanda’s leadership, which grew increasingly paranoid, defensive, and fanatical.
The government promoted the idea that the two were part of a larger plot to destroy the country and restore the harsh exploitation of the Hutu majority by a small minority of Tutsi nobles that had existed in Rwanda for seven decades, from the 1890s to 1961. The autonomous Rwandan government, on the other hand, was directed by a small elite group called the akazu (or “the family,” in the sense of the mafia). This small group of close associates of then-President Juvenal Habyarimana wielded tight, largely unchallenged control over all matters political, military, administrative, and financial.
Beginning in late 1990, this control was progressively challenged (or, in the opinion of the akazu, endangered) by members of newly formed opposition parties and incursions by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, an armed refugee group (RPF). Opposition party members work hard to increase their party’s membership and secure government positions, frequently through intimidation and violence. Several parties, most notably the dominant Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement and its main opponents, such as the Mouvement Démocratique Républicain, made significant investments in their youth wings, using them to both encourage and frighten new members.
Party volunteers also worked to intimidate, weaken, or openly assault other parties’ local-level administrators, hoping to acquire political capital by rendering them useless. By mid-1992, chronic political issues had immobilized administration in numerous areas, allowing locals to disobey authority. As Rwanda descended into massive civil disobedience and political bloodshed, its president faced repeated invasions by the RPF, which had established a firm foothold in the country’s north in early 1992.
This achievement provided the RPF with enough international clout to drive Habyarimana to the bargaining table during a series of international-brokered peace talks in Arusha, Tanzania, in mid-1992. He was pressed to agree to a cease-fire in July of that year. He signed the first of a series of agreements known as the Arusha Accords in August 1992.
The accords established a new structure for Rwanda’s government, ensuring power-sharing with the RPF as well as internal opposition parties. Although these concessions attracted sympathy (and, more importantly, economic aid) outside Rwanda, they were met with derision within the country. Habyarimana was very aware of the political cost of peace talks, so he criticized them at home while praising them to make foreign donors happy.
The “double” process of negotiating peace with the RPF while silently allowing and even committing acts of political and ethnic violence escalated during 1993. The RPF breached the cease-fire in February, killing hundreds of people. This violation shattered an alliance formed between the RPF and the Rwandan opposition, splintered opposition groups, and sparked a “Hutu Power” coalition. Hutu Power supporters hoped to bridge political divides by instilling anti-Tutsi fear and hostility.
Many people were predisposed to listen to the anti-RPF and anti-Tutsi propaganda spewing from a new, akazu-controlled radio station, Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM), which began broadcasting in April 1993. The station catered to the young, who were drawn in by the station’s fashionable music, fast-paced programming, and witty commentary. Many grownups were unconcerned about it. This changed abruptly in 1993, when a political disaster overtook neighboring Burundi. Burundi’s first democratically elected president, a Hutu, was assassinated on October 21 by his country’s Tutsi-dominated army.
Burundi’s painstakingly formed Tutsi-Hutu political coalition crumbled quickly, replaced by horrific violence. This massive catastrophe was all that the Rwandan Hutu Power movement needed to convince their people that cooperating with the Tutsi-dominated RPF was a recipe for disaster. What is the cause of the conflict between Hutus and Tutsis? In late 1993 and early 1994, there was distrust, hostile language about the Hutu need for preemptive self-defense against all Tutsis, increased militia training, and secret arms depots.
When the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) arrived in Rwanda in December 1993 to help with the implementation of the Arusha Accords, they discovered indications of clandestine arming of people. The UNAMIR reports on clandestine civilian defense actions became more clear, precise, and urgent as the weeks went by.
However, the reports garnered little attention from UN headquarters. The peace accords drew international attention. President Habyarimana’s plane was targeted with missiles fired from a site near Kigali airport on the evening of April 6, 1994, as he returned from peace talks in Tanzania.
Everyone on board the plane died, including Habyarimana, his chief of staff, and the president of Burundi. As of this writing, the identity of the assassin is unknown. Within hours of the incident, elite military troops, including the presidential guard, rushed through Kigali’s streets, erecting roadblocks, barricading major members of the political opposition inside their homes, and removing Hutu Power figures.
Later that night, they began assassinating opposition leaders and their families, aided by regular army units and members of youth militias. Armed soldiers and militia men brandishing lists of named “enemies,” mostly Hutu political heavyweights who had failed to embrace Hutu Power, as well as some famous Tutsis, trolled Kigali’s middle-class areas, breaking into residences and killing their targets by the morning of April 7.
Meanwhile, senior Hutu Power and Akazu members gathered to plot and suggest presidential candidates. Even as they dealt with the FAR’s kidnapping, torture, and death of UN servicemen, UNAMIR officers urged the Rwandan military (Forces Armées Rwandaises, or FAR) to restore calm. UNAMIR also struggled to persuade decision-makers at the UN headquarters in New York to widen its mission in order for the agency to respond effectively to the highly sensitive situation.
By the evening of April 7, and over the next several days, with UNAMIR troops present but under strict orders limiting their capacity to respond, the massacre had expanded from the capital city to specific rural areas where Hutu Power had been most active and organized. This growth was incited by RTLM presenters, who urged listeners to find “enemies”—specifically, Tutsis and their moderate Hutu “accomplices” who were portrayed as RPF clandestine agents—and “defend” themselves forcefully.
The news that the RPF had resumed hostilities reinforced this message. Many Hutus initially worried for their lives after learning that the first wave of massacres had targeted Hutu politicians. However, by the end of the first week, the interim administration had circulated the idea that Hutus were not the goal, and that they should not allow divisions among them to divert their attention from the “true” enemy—all Tutsis. As a result, Rwanda was thrust into a complicated sequence of interconnected crises within days of Habyarimana’s killing. The little country was embroiled in an internal power struggle between opportunistic and radical political patrons eager to command their clients to perpetrate massacres in order to outmaneuver their opponents.
It faced abandonment and apathy from an international community that chose to evacuate most foreign nationals, limit the mandate and size of the UNAMIR force, and even urge the UN (in vain) to a total UNAMIR withdrawal. This apathy on the part of the world community created a permissive environment in which the atrocities grew into a full-fledged genocide.
Tutsi civilians were slaughtered in large-scale murders at public venues such as churches and schools, where they had assembled voluntarily, seeking protection, or had been instructed to gather in the days and weeks following the evacuations. Hundreds of Tutsi civilians were concentrated at a specific spot, detained or “protected” by police and/or troops for several days, then attacked with grenades, followed by a close-range assault by a civilian throng armed with machetes, clubs, hammers, and the rare rifle.
As the killings became more frequent and widespread, Rwandans who stood firm in their opposition—including some police, military, and regional administrative officials—were ostracized, intimidated, undermined, sacked, or assassinated. The governmental apparatus was organized to eliminate an entire minority community under the hands of a small cadre of radicals, most notably Colonel Théoneste Bagosora. As this complicated disaster evolved on Rwanda’s hillsides, the United Nations and world leaders focused on how to refer to it rather than how to stop it.
If what had now become a systematic killing of Tutsis was recognized as genocide, the UN and nations that had signed the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide were legally obligated to interfere. However, with the exception of France (which assisted in arming and training the FAR and began the unilateral Operation Turquoise in late June), those governments with the ability to lead a UN intervention distanced themselves from the conflict.
Humanitarian organizations, on the other hand, mobilized to aid Rwandan refugees (one group fleeing the genocide, the other fleeing the RPF’s advance) who fled to neighboring countries. The UN Security Council did not agree to label the Rwandan situation as genocide until June. It was typically too late by this point; more than 80% of all victims had been slain in the first six weeks of the crisis.
More people were killed as the RPF advanced effectively against the FAR in May and June. Hutu authorities screamed angrily for the “patriotic” annihilation of any Tutsis who had survived previous killings. As it gained control, the RPF massacred Hutu civilians both along and behind the front lines.
The RPF took Kigali on July 4, 1994, after heavy combat hill by hill and street by street. The bloodthirsty “interim” government retreated northward, then westward into Zaire in retaliation. As it retreated, the vanquished government declared via the mobile RTLM radio station that the fate that all Hutus feared, a “Tutsi takeover,” had now come to pass. Hutus had to flee for their lives in order to avoid being slaughtered.
Terrified, devastated, and fearful of retaliation, one million Rwandans, nearly all of them Hutus, fled in a matter of days. The humanitarian disaster that resulted from their flight was heartbreaking and documented on global television. The corpse-strewn land they left behind would not attract the world’s attention until much later, as the full scope of what had happened was only gradually understood.
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