Atrocity · April–July 1994
The genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda
Kigali (Rwanda)
On 6 April 1994 a plane carrying Rwanda's president Juvénal Habyarimana and the president of Burundi was shot down as it prepared to land in Kigali (responsibility is still disputed), and within hours Hutu extremists in the army and the Presidential Guard and militias such as the Interahamwe began systematically killing Tutsi civilians and moderate Hutu, among them Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana. Over about 100 days, incited by local officials and by radio broadcasts that called Tutsi "cockroaches", militias and ordinary villagers killed their neighbours, mostly with machetes, at roadblocks, in homes and in the churches and schools where victims had sought refuge, and hundreds of thousands of women were raped.
The killing ended in July when the mainly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebel army took Kigali on 4 July and the north-west by 18 July.
Why it mattered
An estimated 500,000 to 800,000 people were killed, most of them Tutsi, while the outside world failed to intervene: after ten Belgian peacekeepers were murdered and countries pulled out their troops, the UN peacekeeping force was cut from 2,165 to 270. The genocide led to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and the flight of some two million Hutu refugees into neighbouring countries, mainly Zaire, helped trigger the Congo wars.
Elsewhere
Death-toll estimates differ: Human Rights Watch estimated at least half a million (about 507,000 Tutsi, roughly three-quarters of Rwanda's Tutsi population), scholarly estimates of Tutsi deaths range from about 500,000 to 662,000, and the Rwandan government's count is over one million.
Related
- The world in 1994: After the Cold War chapter
- End of apartheid previous moment · 1990–1994
- 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan next moment · 2001–2021