History of the Genocide

The 1994 genocide against Tutsi was a carefully intended and executed exercise to eliminate Tutsi and Hutu who did not agree with the prevailing extremist politics of the Habyarimana regime. More than one million people were killed in only one hundred days. This was and is the fastest and most brutal genocide yet recorded in human history.

The harassment against Tutsi took its origin in the politics of “Divide and rule” introduced by colonialists at the end of the 19th century. The Rwandan society was divided into three ethnic groups and an understanding between these groups started by the 1950s.

In 1959 and throughout the 1960s, the government of Rwanda launched fierce attacks against Tutsi which resulted in mass killings and exodus into neighboring countries: Tanzania, Burundi, Uganda, Congo, and Kenya, thus being considered as the first cycle of genocide in the country. A large segment of the people of Rwanda became stateless, and most of them were denied the right to live in their homeland. The Rwandan leadership preached a message of division, hatred, and violence to the population, resulting in repeated cycles of genocide.

Other occurrences of genocide occurred in 1973 and 1979, which consisted of harassment against Tutsi in schools, different services, and in systematic imprisonments and killings. Between 1990 and 1994 genocide activities existed in the country. During the Habyarimana regime, many Tutsi were killed at Kibirira in October 1990 and thousands of Tutsi in Bigogwe, Northern Rwanda were murdered in February 1991. Some days after in Bugesera, Kibuye, Butare and elsewhere genocide activities against Tutsi started gradually and resulted in tens of thousands of deaths. Then the final genocide occurred in 1994 when in 100 days more than one million of people lost their lives.