⭐ This is Suzuki's favorite article
-Edmund Burke
WARNING: The following story contains extremely graphic material, including images and descriptions of rape, murder, and genocide, which some readers may find disturbing.
Discretion is advised.
In the wake of US military disasters like the invasion of Iraq, there has been a massive surge of support for an isolationist and non-interventionist foreign policy. It is one of the few things the right wing and left wing tend to find common ground on.
Radio pundits from both sides of the political spectrum, such as Alex Jones on the far-right and Kyle Kulinski on the far-left, each proudly and loudly advocate for a strict non-interventionist foreign policy when it comes to military action in other countries.
Our foreign policy is too "hawkish", they say. Our army is controlled by "warmongers" working for the "military-industrial complex", which is enabled by "neoliberal" and "neocon" politicians who promote "regime change" and "illegal offensive wars".
One of the major leading contenders for the Democratic Party's presidential ticket in 2020 is a war veteran named Tulsi Gabbard. Gabbard has made non-interventionism a core ideology of her campaign, and she has been critical of US military action in Syria and US sanctions against countries like Iran and Venezuela.
In particular, Gabbard has been vocally defensive of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. She has denied accusations that he is a war criminal, even though Assad has been known to intimidate, beat, torture, and kill political dissidents, and he has been accused of carrying out massacres, carpet-bombing cities, and gassing women and children with nerve agents such as sarin.
Furthermore, Assad has long been an opponent of the Kurds, an ethnic group living in northeastern Syria that is part of the rebellion against his government. There are worries that, should the US pull out of Syria, Assad will carry out mass reprisals against the Kurds.
Yet Gabbard and her supporters still oppose any military action against Assad in response to these atrocities. They maintain that the US has no business intervening in Syria and that the safety of the Kurds is not our concern.
But this is a very dangerous way of thinking. When non-interventionists proclaim that the US should never be militarily involved in other countries, even to combat an oppressive, genocidal regime, it sets a dangerous precedent, one that can cost the lives of millions of innocent people.
And nowhere was that more clear than in the small African country of Rwanda. 25 years ago, in 1994, Rwanda was home to one of the most abhorrent and horrific atrocities ever seen in modern history.
In the midst of Rwanda's bloody civil war, the ethnic Tutsi minority found itself the target of hatred, bigotry, and, ultimately, mass genocide at the hands of the ethnic Hutu majority. For 100 days, Tutsi men, women, and children were raped, tortured, and slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands by armed militiamen, Hutu ultranationalists, and Rwandan government soldiers.
And while all of this was happening, the rest of the world, proclaiming a strict non-interventionist policy, simply stood by and watched the brutality unfold. No one lifted a finger. No one sent help. No one stepped in to stop the bloodshed, even though they had more than enough opportunities to do so.
This is the story of the Rwandan Genocide. It is a harrowing, gruesome story, but it should serve as a dire warning. It shows the horrific cost of non-interventionist foreign policy, and the ultimate price of inaction.
A Brief History of Rwanda
To understand why and how the Rwandan genocide took place, it is first necessary to discuss the history of Rwanda's ethnic groups, which have been a constant source of strife.
Rwanda is a small country located in the Great Lakes region of central Africa. With a population of 12 million, Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries on earth, and is well known for its mountains, jungles, and wild gorillas.
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| A map of Rwanda |
Rwanda is home to many different ethnic tribes, but, for centuries, there have been two major competing groups: the Hutus, which, at 85% of the population, make up the ethnic majority, and the Tutsis, an ethnic minority making up approximately 14% of Rwanda's population.
The Hutus and Tutsis were originally part of the same ethnic group, but, throughout the centuries, they split into two distinct tribes with different cultures, practices, and even genetics. As a result, ethnic strife and conflict developed between both groups, but, for the most part, each group maintained a steady, if occasionally fragile, peace.
In 1884, the German Empire annexed a large portion of eastern Africa, including Rwanda. The Germans declared the territory an Imperial protectorate, and established a German-friendly puppet state in what became known as German East Africa. For the most part, the German Empire ignored the ethnic differences in Rwanda's populace, so not much changed in that regard.
In 1916, while the planet was embroiled in World War I, German East Africa was invaded and occupied by Belgium. The Belgians established their own government in Rwanda (at the time called Ruanda-Urundi) and made it a Belgian colony.
During the Belgian occupation, the Rwandan populace were ordered to carry "identity cards" which listed their ethnicity. For whatever reason, the Belgians seemed to favor the Tutsis over the Hutus, and a Tutsi-led monarchy was established to rule over Ruanda-Urundi as a Belgian puppet state.
Tutsis were also appointed to be high-ranking officials or wealthy company owners, while the Hutus were often relegated to doing manual labor for their Tutsi employers.
This led to a sharp increase in racial and ethnic strife between the Hutus and Tutsis, one that the Belgian government was seemingly ignorant of. And, throughout the years of Belgian occupation and Tutsi-dominated rule, resentment began to stir between the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda.
In 1945, the Belgian occupiers departed Rwanda, leaving it under the control of the Tutsi monarchy, but they also left a volatile atmosphere of tension between the Hutus and Tutsis in their wake. Many Hutus wanted revenge for their treatment at the hands of the Tutsis, who they saw as collaborators with the Belgian occupiers. They thought it unfair that, even though they were a majority, they had been governed by an ethnic minority.
This led to the rise of numerous Hutu-nationalist organizations and political parties in Rwanda. In 1959, the Hutus launched a political revolution against the Tutsi government, leading to a violent series of extrajudicial killings and riots that would leave over 20,000 dead, and in 1962 the Tutsi-led monarchy collapsed due to internal strife.
After the revolution, Rwanda's populace elected Gregoire Kayibanda, a Hutu nationalist and right-wing populist, as their president. Kayibanda was ostensibly a moderate, but he and his right-wing Parmehutu party openly asserted Hutu dominance over Rwanda and turned a blind eye to the growing persecution of Tutsis at the hands of Hutu nationalists. Killings of Tutsis by Hutu vigilantes became commonplace, and over 300,000 Tutsis fled Rwanda to escape the violence.
However, Kayibanda's more moderate policies angered Hutu extremists, who still sought to exact revenge on Rwanda's Tutsi population. Kayibanda's support evaporated quickly and he soon found his rule being challenged by a rising Hutu extremist political movement.
In July, 1973, Kayibanda was overthrown in a coup led by Major-General Juvenal Habyarimana, a young, power-hungry Rwandan military officer and Hutu nationalist who openly resented the Tutsis. Habyarimana was the founder and leader of the National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development (MRND), a far-right, ultranationalist political party that professed an openly racist, Hutu-supremacist ideology known as "Hutu Power", which called for the formation of a Hutu ethnostate in Rwanda and the expulsion of all other ethnic groups in general and the Tutsi in particular.
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| Juvenal Habyarimana, a young, far-right Hutu nationalist, seized power in Rwanda following a coup in 1973. His regime, led by fellow Hutu extremists, made life miserable for Rwandan Tutsis, who were persecuted on a daily basis. |
Habyarimana transformed Rwanda into a single-party state, abolishing all rival political organizations. He installed himself as a dictator and openly preached Hutu supremacist propaganda.
While vigilante violence against the Tutsi abated once Habyarimana took power, the Tutsi minority still found themselves the targets of discrimination by their Hutu neighbors. The government showed little, if any, concern for their plights, and often outright encouraged discrimination against the Tutsis.
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| During his rule as President of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana constructed a cult of personality around himself and his family, even having fans display giant images of his face at sporting events |
During the rule of both Kayibanda and Habyarimana, tens of thousands of Tutsi refugees had fled north to Uganda, and many wanted to one day be able to return home. One of these refugees, an intelligent and ambitious Tutsi activist named Paul Kagame, helped form the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in 1987. Kagame intended to arm a resistance movement to overthrow the Rwandan government and topple Habyarimana. He, like many Tutsi, was fed up with the Rwandan government's persecution of his people.
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| Tutsi refugee Paul Kagame formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in 1987, with the goal of overthrowing Rwanda's Hutu-led regime |
Civil War
On October 1st, 1990, the RPF made their move. That morning, 50 RPF rebels serving in the Ugandan army deserted their posts, advanced across the border, and attacked a Rwandan border outpost near Kagitumba. In the resulting firefight, one Rwandan border guard was killed and the rest scattered in different directions. The initial rebel force was soon joined by over 3,000 more heavily-armed RPF fighters, who began a fast-moving offensive southwards towards the capital, Kigali.
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| RPF soldiers pose with a destroyed Rwandan anti-aircraft gun on October 22, 1990 |
On the first day alone, the RPF advanced more than 37 miles into Rwanda. Within days, the rebels had captured the city of Gabiro, and, despite being outnumbered and outgunned, overwhelmed the Rwandan army. Rwanda had been plunged into a state of violent civil war, and Habyarimana now found his regime in serious danger.
When Habyarimana heard of the invasion, he turned to France for help. The French government supplied Habyarimana with tanks, aircraft, and heavy weaponry, enabling him to quickly gain the upper hand over the RPF. The neighboring country of Zaire also stepped in to help, sending hundreds of elite troops to assist the Rwandan Army in countering the rebel offensive.
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| Rwandan soldiers patrol the streets of Kigali following the outbreak of war. Note that the armored car is a French-made AML tankette. |
Things began to go wrong for the RPF almost immediately. Just two days into the war, the RPF's senior military commander, Fred Rwigyema, was killed in action during intense fighting with Rwandan soldiers at Nyabwenshogozi Hill. Paul Kagame was in the United States at the time, studying military strategy at West Point, and he had to quickly return to Rwanda to take command of the RPF and prevent an internal power struggle.
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| The RPF's senior military commander, Major General Fred Rwigyema, was killed in action just two days into the Rwandan Civil War, when a stray bullet hit him in the head during a firefight with Rwandan government soldiers. His military partner, Paul Kagame, succeeded him as the RPF's leader. |
Following the outbreak of war, Habyarimana's regime began to incite hatred against the Tutsi population. The national broadcasting station, Radio Rwanda, accused the Tutsis of treason and encouraged Hutus to fight back against the "invaders in our midst". Violence against the Tutsi began to explode, with Hutu militiamen and government soldiers attacking, detaining, and sometimes even murdering Tutsi civilians.
On October 11, 1990, a Tutsi commune in Rwanda's Gisenyi Province became the target of a massive Hutu-led pogrom, which killed 383 of its residents. It was the first mass slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda in more than 20 years.
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| Rwandan and Zairian troops prepare to mount an offensive to retake the city of Gabiro from the RPF in late October, 1990. Despite some early gains, the RPF quickly found the tide of war turning against them within a few weeks of their invasion. |
By early November, the Rwandan army, with the support of the French military, had launched a massive counterattack against the RPF, which began suffering serious losses of both manpower and territory. Faced with utter defeat, and with the rebels' morale running low, Paul Kagame ordered the RPF to retreat into the Virunga Mountains to regroup and plan their next move.
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| A Rwandan soldier inspects a civilian's identity card while guarding captured RPF fighters in October, 1990 |
In the meantime, the Rwandan government, believing the rebellion to be permanently quelled, grew complacent and began to let down their guard. In late December of 1990, the Zairian troops that had assisted the Habyarimana's forces in quelling the initial offensive went back home, and it was here that the RPF saw their opportunity arise once again.
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| Rwandan government soldiers outside Kagitumba in late 1990, a few miles from the Virunga Mountains, where the RPF took refuge after the government counterattack. |
The RPF rebels spent eight long hours engaging in bloody urban combat with Rwandan soldiers, police, and French paratroopers in Ruhengeri. Although the rebels sustained heavy casualties, the RPF had the element of surprise, and by noon the entire city had been captured and hundreds of incarcerated political dissidents had been freed from the city prison.
The battle had cost the RPF more than 100 fighters (while the Rwandan army suffered only 18 dead) but the hard-fought victory provided the RPF with a giant boost of morale, and strengthened the rebels' resolve to continue their revolution. The Rwandan army would launch a series of counterattacks to try and retake Ruhengeri, but the rebels firmly held their ground and repelled every single attempt to recapture the city.
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| Paul Kagame addresses RPF fighters during the Rwandan Civil War |
Unfortunately, the civil war also served to further divide Rwanda along ethnic lines. Because the RPF was mainly Tutsi, and the Rwandan government was controlled by Hutu nationalists, tensions between Tutsi and Hutu civilians were further inflamed by the war. Government propaganda painted the Tutsi population as traitors and spies for the RPF, and encouraged Hutus to persecute and attack them.
As the civil war raged on, the MRND's official newspaper, Kangura, published a vile document entitled "The Hutu Ten Commandments". This document served as a manifesto of sorts for the far-right "Hutu Power" movement, and explicitly called for the eradication of the Tutsi.
The Hutu Ten Commandments declared the Tutsis to be an inferior race, and outright encouraged discrimination against them. The army, government, education system, and police force had to be entirely Hutu, said the manifesto, and all true Rwandans needed to strive to turn Rwanda into a Hutu ethnostate.
All other ethnic groups, especially Tutsis, would have to leave Rwanda or be eradicated by force.
Hutus who mingled with, married, or did business with Tutsis were branded as "race traitors", who deserved nothing short of execution.
Government radio stations also spread hateful rhetoric against the Tutsis, branding them as "aliens" who sought to restore the Rwandan Monarchy and enslave all Hutus. They were branded as non-Christians working for foreign agents and savage traitors seeking to destroy Rwanda's ethnic and cultural heritage.
Violence against Rwanda's Tutsi populace exploded. Pogroms against the Tutsi population by Hutu extremists killed hundreds and sent thousands fleeing the country.
Hearing of the killings, the Tutsi-led RPF began to carry out retaliatory attacks on Hutu civilians in occupied areas. Rwanda, it seemed, was on the verge of a full-fledged sectarian conflict.
The Arusha Accords
As the civil war raged on with no end in sight, President Juvenal Habyarimana soon seemed to realize the hopelessness of the situation. Although he hated the Tutsis and despised the RPF, Habyarimana was extremely cautious. Above all, like most dictators, he wanted to maintain his power, even if it meant compromising with his enemies.
Habyarimana soon realized that the RPF's rebellion could not be suppressed by brute force. The war was going nowhere and was costing his government heavily. Additionally, the United Nations had taken notice of the humanitarian aspects of the civil war, and was planning on sending a peacekeeping force into Rwanda to stop the pogroms and encourage a peaceful resolution to the conflict.
In 1992, Habyarimana decided to grant concessions to his political opponents in an attempt to pacify them. He announced that Rwanda would now allow multiple political parties, and he appointed more liberal politicians to his cabinet. In addition, he decided to arrange a six-month ceasefire and open peace talks with the RPF.
These actions, however, angered many extremist Hutus, who saw Habyarimana's concessions as him caving to the demands of the Tutsis. In late 1992, these Hutu extremists formed the Coalition for the Defense of the Republic (CDR), an ultra-far-right "Hutu Power" opposition party whose goal was to undermine any peace process between the Hutu-led Rwandan government and the Tutsi-led RPF.
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| The Coalition for the Defense of the Republic (CDR) was a far-right Rwandan Hutu Power party formed in 1992. It was even more extreme than the ruling MRND party. |
Violent anti-Tutsi riots occurred in Kigali, with angry Hutus demanding Habyarimana end negotiations and resume fighting. "Hutu Power" rallies organized by the CDR and extremist MRND factions were a common sight in Kigali, with Hutu extremists chanting anti-Tutsi slogans and encouraging violence against non-Hutus.
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| Far-right "Hutu Power" activists rally in Kigali in late 1993. President Habyarimana's willingness to negotiate with the Tutsi rebels angered many Hutu extremists and helped fuel the rise of radical, racist Hutu militias. |
Fearing that he would lose crucial support from extremist Hutu factions, Habyarimana ultimately decided to pull out of the peace talks and resume the war against the RPF. In 1993, the ceasefire collapsed and fighting resumed.
But the RPF was ready as well. On February 8th, 1993, the RPF launched a massive offensive against the Rwandan Army, advancing south towards Kigali and leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. The Rwandan Armed Forces were overwhelmed by the rebel advance and retreated towards Kigali to regroup. In the meantime, however, the RPF captured huge swaths of land and several major cities.
In response to the offensive, the French army sent 300 soldiers to Rwanda in late February to bolster Habyarimana. French artillery began shelling RPF positions and French-supplied Rwandan Army helicopters carried out devastating strafing attacks on RPF convoys, ultimately stalling the rebel advance just 19 miles north of Kigali.
Instead of pressing forward, Paul Kagame ordered the RPF to stand down and declare another ceasefire. Concerned that his rule would be in serious danger should he refuse, Habyarimana once again agreed to engage in peace talks with the rebels.
For two days, with the UN acting as a sort of moderator, Habyarimana engaged in peace talks with Kagame and the RPF leadership in Kampala, Uganda. Desperate to hold on to power, and frightened by the rising Hutu extremist wing of Rwanda, Habyarimana decided to broker a deal with the RPF.
He and Kagame agreed to partition the country into a small northern sector occupied by the RPF while the rest of the country would remain under Habyarimana's control. A demilitarized zone would divide the two sectors and, hopefully, prevent further violence.
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| The division of Rwanda according to the 1993 Arusha Accords, with the RPF controlling a small northern sector of the country and the Hutu-led government controlling the rest, with a demilitarized zone separating the two. |
This agreement, known as the Arusha Accords, was signed in June of 1993. Although the war was not officially over, the terms of the Accords called for a maintained ceasefire until further notice. Under the terms of the agreement, a UN Peacekeeping force would also be deployed to Rwanda to ensure both sides complied with the Accords. It looked like the brutal war might finally come to an end.
In the meantime, however, tensions between Hutus and Tutsis continued to exist. In December of 1993, Melchior Ndadaye, the Hutu prime minister of the neighboring country of Burundi, was assassinated by extremist Tutsi defectors. The killing, though not connected to the Rwandan conflict, further reinforced the extremist Hutus' belief that the Tutsis could not be negotiated with, and would stab them in the back if given the chance.
As the ceasefire between the Rwandan government and the RPF continued throughout the rest of 1993, Hutu extremists began to organize, train, and arm numerous militias in preparation for a war against the Tutsi population. Both the MRND and CDR formed paramilitary wings of their respective parties.
The MRND formed a paramilitary wing consisting of young Hutu Power extremists, known as the Interahamwe (which roughly translates to "those who work together"). Ironically, the founder of the Interahamwe, Robert Kajuga, was born a Tutsi. As an adult he had "converted" to a Hutu, and had dedicated his life to waging war against the ethnic group he once belonged to.
The CDR also formed its own party militia, called the Impuzamugambi (which roughly translates to "those with the same goal"). Like the Interahamwe, the Impuzamugambi consisted of young Hutu extremists, and was led by Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza - a Rwandan diplomat and Hutu Power radio pundit - and Hassan Ngeze - an anti-Tutsi "journalist" who wrote for the MRND's newspaper, Kangura.
Although the militias had been officially organized as civilian "self-defense" groups, their ulterior purpose was much more sinister. The Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi militias were highly trained in paramilitary tactics, especially hand-to-hand combat, and had received much of their training from Rwandan and French military commanders.
But the Interahamwe's training was not limited to military tactics. They were also subjected to ideological indoctrination. Hutu Power propaganda was drilled into their minds 24/7 by the MRND's official radio station - Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, or RTLM.
RTLM was a powerhouse of racist, anti-Tutsi, and Hutu nationalist hate propaganda. For hours everyday, pundits shouted and screamed their hateful diatribes across the airwaves for all to hear. They called on Hutus to rise up against the Tutsi population. They branded the Tutsis as "aliens", "traitors", "rats", "cockroaches", and "subhuman filth" that deserved nothing short of total annihilation. RTLM's goal was to instill a festering hatred of the Tutsi minority in the hearts of all Hutus and, in doing so, convert them to the racist Hutu Power cause.
One of the most notorious pundits on RTLM was Froduald Karamira. Like Robert Kajuga, Karamira was born into a Tutsi family but had been "accepted" as a Hutu as an adult.
Karamira was the vice president of the Republican Democratic Movement (MDR) - a splinter group from the MRND - and acted as one of Juvenal Habyarimana's chief propagandists. He was notorious for his long, hate-filled speeches decrying the "Tutsi invaders", and it was Karamira who first coined the term "Hutu Power".
But Karamira intended to go well beyond simple talk. He took his ideology to heart, and soon he and a collection of other far-right Hutu politicians began planning a massive ethnic cleansing operation against Rwanda's Tutsi population. Karamira and his cohorts referred to this operation as a "final solution" to the "Tutsi infestation" - eerily reminiscent of the Nazi "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Question".
Under Karamira's direction, the MRND and CDR initiated a massive armaments program for the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi militias, importing thousands of machetes, clubs, guns, grenades, and rounds of ammunition. While the fragile peace agreement wore on, few knew that Rwanda was being geared up for mass genocide.
And it was here that everything started to go wrong.
By January of 1994, the ceasefire between the RPF and the Rwandan army had been ongoing for five months. The UN peacekeeping force had begun to believe that the civil war was winding down, and that a peaceful resolution was around the corner.
But, that same month, General Romeo Dallaire, the commander of the UN Peacekeeping force in Rwanda, received troubling news from an informant who had defected from the Interahamwe.
The informant, a former trainer for the militias, had undergone a change of heart. Realizing that the extremist Hutu militias were being geared for mass slaughter, he wanted the UN to stop what he believed to be an inevitable genocide against the Tutsis.
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| President Habyarimana (right) during the negotiations for the Arusha Accords in Kampala, Uganda |
In the meantime, however, tensions between Hutus and Tutsis continued to exist. In December of 1993, Melchior Ndadaye, the Hutu prime minister of the neighboring country of Burundi, was assassinated by extremist Tutsi defectors. The killing, though not connected to the Rwandan conflict, further reinforced the extremist Hutus' belief that the Tutsis could not be negotiated with, and would stab them in the back if given the chance.
Hate Radio and the Rise of the Militias
As the ceasefire between the Rwandan government and the RPF continued throughout the rest of 1993, Hutu extremists began to organize, train, and arm numerous militias in preparation for a war against the Tutsi population. Both the MRND and CDR formed paramilitary wings of their respective parties.
The MRND formed a paramilitary wing consisting of young Hutu Power extremists, known as the Interahamwe (which roughly translates to "those who work together"). Ironically, the founder of the Interahamwe, Robert Kajuga, was born a Tutsi. As an adult he had "converted" to a Hutu, and had dedicated his life to waging war against the ethnic group he once belonged to.
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| Interahamwe militants in training |
The CDR also formed its own party militia, called the Impuzamugambi (which roughly translates to "those with the same goal"). Like the Interahamwe, the Impuzamugambi consisted of young Hutu extremists, and was led by Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza - a Rwandan diplomat and Hutu Power radio pundit - and Hassan Ngeze - an anti-Tutsi "journalist" who wrote for the MRND's newspaper, Kangura.
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| The MRND's official magazine, Kangura, mocked and dehumanized Tutsis with racist cartoons and editorials, referring to them as "inyenzi" ("cockroaches"). It was popular reading among Hutu Power extremists. This issue of Kangura is sarcastically titled "Tutsis: The Race of God!" The white text in the black box next to the machete reads "What weapons shall we use to slay the cockroaches for good?" |
Although the militias had been officially organized as civilian "self-defense" groups, their ulterior purpose was much more sinister. The Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi militias were highly trained in paramilitary tactics, especially hand-to-hand combat, and had received much of their training from Rwandan and French military commanders.
But the Interahamwe's training was not limited to military tactics. They were also subjected to ideological indoctrination. Hutu Power propaganda was drilled into their minds 24/7 by the MRND's official radio station - Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, or RTLM.
RTLM was a powerhouse of racist, anti-Tutsi, and Hutu nationalist hate propaganda. For hours everyday, pundits shouted and screamed their hateful diatribes across the airwaves for all to hear. They called on Hutus to rise up against the Tutsi population. They branded the Tutsis as "aliens", "traitors", "rats", "cockroaches", and "subhuman filth" that deserved nothing short of total annihilation. RTLM's goal was to instill a festering hatred of the Tutsi minority in the hearts of all Hutus and, in doing so, convert them to the racist Hutu Power cause.
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| Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) was a vile hate-radio station managed by Hutu extremists. Every day, RTLM's pundits would preach their message of hatred and intolerance over the airwaves, seeking to inflame tensions between the Hutus and Tutsis. |
One of the most notorious pundits on RTLM was Froduald Karamira. Like Robert Kajuga, Karamira was born into a Tutsi family but had been "accepted" as a Hutu as an adult.
Karamira was the vice president of the Republican Democratic Movement (MDR) - a splinter group from the MRND - and acted as one of Juvenal Habyarimana's chief propagandists. He was notorious for his long, hate-filled speeches decrying the "Tutsi invaders", and it was Karamira who first coined the term "Hutu Power".
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| Froduald Karamira attends a Hutu Power rally in 1991. Originally born to a Tutsi family, Karamira "converted" to a Hutu as an adult, and became one of the most vile and vitriolic propagators of anti-Tutsi hate speech. |
But Karamira intended to go well beyond simple talk. He took his ideology to heart, and soon he and a collection of other far-right Hutu politicians began planning a massive ethnic cleansing operation against Rwanda's Tutsi population. Karamira and his cohorts referred to this operation as a "final solution" to the "Tutsi infestation" - eerily reminiscent of the Nazi "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Question".
Under Karamira's direction, the MRND and CDR initiated a massive armaments program for the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi militias, importing thousands of machetes, clubs, guns, grenades, and rounds of ammunition. While the fragile peace agreement wore on, few knew that Rwanda was being geared up for mass genocide.
And it was here that everything started to go wrong.
The Missed Warnings
By January of 1994, the ceasefire between the RPF and the Rwandan army had been ongoing for five months. The UN peacekeeping force had begun to believe that the civil war was winding down, and that a peaceful resolution was around the corner.
But, that same month, General Romeo Dallaire, the commander of the UN Peacekeeping force in Rwanda, received troubling news from an informant who had defected from the Interahamwe.
The informant, a former trainer for the militias, had undergone a change of heart. Realizing that the extremist Hutu militias were being geared for mass slaughter, he wanted the UN to stop what he believed to be an inevitable genocide against the Tutsis.
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| General Romeo Dallaire was the leader of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) helping to enforce the Arusha peace agreement. Beginning in January, 1994, Dallaire would try to raise the alarm about an impending genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, but his superiors would turn a blind eye to his warnings. |
General Dallaire believed the informant's allegations, and he, too, feared that the peace process could be undermined. He sent an urgent message to the UN leadership in New York City, repeating the warnings the informant had given him.
Dallaire informed the UN leadership that he intended to launch a massive raid on the Interahamwe's arm caches and put an end to the threat they posed. It was imperative, he said, that the UN establish a level of control over the situation, and demonstrate an intention to enforce the peace agreement between the Rwandan government and the RPF.
But Dallaire's dire warnings fell on deaf ears. The UN leadership sent a response to him ordering him not to take any military action whatsoever against the militias. He was to cancel any planned raids on arms caches, and focus instead on nonviolent methods to keep the peace.
Even worse, the UN ordered Dallaire to share the information he received with the Rwandan government - the very same government that the informant had said was arming the militias.
If Dallaire took military action, the UN said, he would be violating his mandate and would face a court martial.
At the time, the UN and the US were trying to adopt a non-interventionist foreign policy when it came to armed conflicts. In November of 1993, a joint UN-US operation in Mogadishu, Somalia, had gone terribly wrong when two US helicopters were shot down by Somali terrorists, killing 18 US soldiers and two UN peacekeepers. Hundreds of Somali civilians were also killed. The operation was a tactical disaster and fueled the rise of non-interventionism in both US and international foreign policy.
Dallaire was frustrated. He felt as if his warnings were being ignored, and feared the UN was setting the situation up for disaster. But, unable to sway his superiors, General Dallaire called off the raids on the Interahamwe, and he had no choice but to follow orders and share this crucial information with the Rwandan government.
It was to be the first in a long line of frustrating mistakes and inactions by the UN and the rest of the world.
Last Chances
As Dallaire predicted, the Rwandan government informed the Interahamwe that the UN knew of their plans. Worse, however, they told the militias that it was clear the UN was unwilling to use military action to enforce the peace agreement. Emboldened by the UN inaction, the Interahamwe leaders were now confident that nobody from the rest of the world was going to stand in their way when the time came.
The Interahamwe began compiling lists of Tutsis, moderate Hutus, and political opponents that they intended to target for assassination. Their plan for mass extermination was beginning to enter its next phase.
Beginning in early March of 1994, the Interahamwe began carrying out targeted attacks against political opponents, almost on a daily basis. At night, bands of soldiers and militiamen would raid the houses of suspected "Tutsi spies". Some of those targeted would be beaten and left battered on the side of the road. Others would turn up dead. Most were simply never seen again.
The Tutsi population, having already endured decades of discrimination by Rwanda's Hutu majority, quickly realized that the peace process was deteriorating. They pressured the US and UN to take action and stop the militias' reign of terror.
But the US and UN refused to take action. In doing so, they lost their last chance to maintain peace in Rwanda. On April 6th, 1994, the peace process, and any hopes for a nonviolent resolution, went up in flames.
April 6th: The Apocalypse Begins
On April 6th, 1994, in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, President Juvenal Habyarimana concluded a week-long international summit with other African leaders, and prepared to head home.
Accompanied by Cyprien Ntaryamira - the president of Burundi - and ten other delegates, Habyarimana boarded his private Dassault Falcon 50 jet, bid his Tanzanian hosts farewell, and began the flight back to Kigali, Rwanda.
At about 8:20 PM in Kigali, president Habyarimana's plane began circling over Kigali International Airport, preparing its final approach for landing.
As it did so, a missile streaked across the sky and impacted against the wing of the Dassault Falcon. Seconds later, a second missile followed, striking the tail of the aircraft and sending it spiraling out of control.
Belching flames and smoke, the jet careened towards the presidential palace, crashed into the palace's garden, and exploded in a deafening, fiery blast.
There were no survivors. Everybody - President Habyarimana, President Ntaryamira, Rwandan Army Chief-of-Staff Deogratias Nsabimana, the three French diplomats, and all others on board the plane - died instantly.
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| The wreckage of President Habyarimana's private plane in the garden of Kigali's Presidential Palace, shot down by unknown assailants. Habyarimana's death would serve as a catalyst for the Rwandan Genocide to begin. |
Someone on the ground had fired two surface-to-air missiles at Habyarimana's plane. To this day, it is unclear who was behind the attack. Some blame rebels from the RPF for the assassination. Others blame Hutu extremists angry at Habyarimana for negotiating with the Tutsis.
Regardless of who carried out the assassination, the end result was the same. The fragile ceasefire had been shattered. Any hopes for peace in Rwanda went up in flames the moment Habyarimana's plane crashed into the ground. The Hutu extremists now had their excuse to begin the extermination of their Tutsi neighbors.
Yet, even with the peace process in its death throes, much of the international community still stubbornly refused to accept the fact that disaster was inevitable.
The Moderates: Clearing the Last Roadblock
Within hours of Habyarimana's assassination, Rwanda quickly delved into chaos. To many Hutu extremists, the death of Habyarimana meant that the peace process was over effective immediately. As word of the assassination spread around Rwanda, Hutu extremists began rioting, launching reprisal attacks against the Tutsis. Violence quickly unfolded, and, once again, Rwanda found itself in the midst of a civil war.
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| Fires rage outside the Rwandan parliament as the civil war resumes in Kigali. When fighting resumed in April, 1994, 600 RPF fighters present for peace talks remained trapped in the capital city and had to hold out for months until reinforcements could arrive. |
On the morning of April 7th, 1994, the residents of Kigali awoke to the sounds of automatic gunfire erupting all over the city. Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi militias roamed the streets and shot indiscriminately at suspected Tutsis. Some Tutsi civilians within Kigali resisted and returned the militias' fire with their own weapons. Throughout the day, gun battles raged through Kigali. The civil war was once again in full swing.
The UN tried fruitlessly to restore order. Following Habyarimana's death, they tried to turn power over to Madame Agathe, a Hutu moderate appointed by the UN as Rwanda's acting prime minister. Madame Agathe and her two young sons resided in a fortified compound within Kigali, guarded by Belgian and Guinean UN Peacekeepers. As fighting raged through Kigali, the UN sought to protect Madame Agathe from harm. She was hidden in a closet within the compound as the UN peacekeepers assembled outside to wave off any intruders.
At about 8:30 AM that morning, the compound was surrounded by a squad of Rwandan soldiers and members of the Akazu, a Hutu extremist militia that had acted as Habyarimana's personal guard. Immediately, the Rwandan soldiers began sporadically shooting at the compound and the UN Peacekeepers guarding it.
The UN peacekeepers radioed for instructions and asked if they could return the fire. After all, their mission was first and foremost to protect Prime Minister Agathe from harm. There was now a clear and present danger to that mission.
But the response from the UN high command was an emphatic "No". Do not return fire, they said. Do not use any military force. They were to avoid armed conflict at all costs. If any peacekeepers returned fire, said the UN command, they would be court-martialed.
The stubbornness of the UN high command was now becoming very dangerous. Even now, with hopes for peace all but dashed, and with militants now attempting to kill the UN-appointed Prime Minister, the UN still was unwilling to use any force to stop the bloodshed unfolding before their eyes.
At about 9:00 AM, the Rwandan soldiers stormed Madame Agathe's compound, quickly encircling the UN Peacekeepers sent there to guard her. Once again, the UN peacekeepers radioed for instructions. The attackers were now inside the compound, and were heavily armed. Did they now have permission to use force to protect the prime minister?
Yet again, however, the response from the UN high command was "No". No use of force would be permitted. Unbelievably, the peacekeepers were ordered to try and negotiate with the assailants rather than take military action, and to try and talk them out of killing anybody.
With no way to stop the attackers, the UN peacekeepers had no choice but to surrender their weapons to the Rwandan army. The 15 Guinean peacekeepers were allowed by the militants to leave the compound, but the ten Belgian peacekeepers were held captive and marched away to Camp Kigali, a nearby Rwandan military base just down the road.
Inside a small wooden shack within the camp, the peacekeepers were forced to lie on the ground, where, as they screamed for help, they were hacked with machetes and bayonets by the Rwandan soldiers. General Dallaire was a few hundred yards away, and could hear his men crying out in agony.
Dallaire radioed his superiors to ask for instructions. But, yet again, the UN command ordered him to not use any force against the attackers. He was to negotiate with the Rwandan leadership, and nothing more.
While Dallaire tried helplessly to negotiate, unable to help his men, the Rwandan militants bound and gagged the ten Belgian peacekeepers, lined them up against the wall, and methodically executed each of them with a shot to the head.
The UN's stubborn non-interventionist strategy had just cost the lives of ten of their own men, but the worst was yet to come.
At 9:30 AM, the Rwandan soldiers discovered Madame Agathe hiding in a closet within her compound. With nobody to help her, she was dragged out into the open and, as she screamed in terror, she and her husband were shot dead.
Agathe's two young sons witnessed their mother's execution, but, miraculously, were not discovered and ultimately survived.
With Agathe's death, the last hope for a peaceful resolution was shattered. If there was any sign that peace was not an option, this was it. Action had to be taken before the situation got any worse.
But still, in an almost incomprehensible display of stubbornness, the UN refused to take any military action. This, in the end, would be a catastrophic mistake.
As the UN stood by, unwilling to restore order to the carnage unfolding in Rwanda, the Hutu extremists quickly installed a new ruler to replace Habyarimana.
On April 9th, 1994, a "crisis committee" of Rwandan politicians installed a new ruling administration. Unlike Habyarimana, who had been forced to allow ethnic diversity within his cabinet, this administration consisted entirely of far-right Hutu extremists hell-bent on launching violence against the Tutsis.
In Habyarimana's place, the Hutu extremist leadership appointed Theodore Sindikubwabo, a former physician-turned-Hutu Power activist, to be Rwanda's president. Sindikubwabo, unlike his predecessor, openly advocated for the extermination of Tutsis.
To replace Madame Agathe, a Hutu extremist named Jean Kambanda was sworn in as the new Prime Minister of Rwanda. Kambanda was, even by MRND standards, an extreme right-wing Hutu nationalist. Like Sindikubwabo, Kambanda openly advocated for genocide against Rwanda's Tutsi population, and he was one of the principle organizers of the "Final Solution" to the "Tutsi problem".
Kambanda and his chief-of-staff, a Rwandan military colonel named Theoneste Bagosora, had established a network of Interahamwe militias all across Rwanda in preparation for the "Final Solution". Bagosora, like Kambanda, was a far-right Hutu extremist, and he had vowed to unleash an "apocalypse" against the Tutsis.
From the stations at the hate radio RTLM, the following message was broadcast: "Cut the tall trees!"
This innocuous-sounding message was actually a code word. Tutsis tended to be taller than their Hutu neighbors, so this message was the signal for the militias to begin their wholesale slaughter of the Tutsis. All across Rwanda, the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi, with the assistance of the Rwandan Army and other extremist Hutus, began to carry out mass killings of their Tutsi neighbors.
The genocide was now underway.
The first large-scale massacre of the Rwandan genocide took place on April 9th, at a Polish mission in Gikondo, Rwanda. Two soldiers from the Presidential Guard, accompanied by two Rwandan gendarmes, entered the mission and ordered the more than 120 congregants to show their identity cards, which listed the bearer's ethnicity.
One of the Polish priests became angry. All of the worshipers were Christians, he said, and they were welcome in his church regardless of their ethnic background.
But the soldiers refused to leave. "You traitor!", yelled one of the gendarmes. "This church is harboring cockroaches!" He raised his rifle, but the Rwandan commander told him to stand down. "Don't waste your bullets!", he ordered. "The Interahamwe will deal with them."
Shortly afterwards, a band of 100 Interahamwe militiamen armed with clubs and machetes entered the church. Immediately, they led away the few Hutus in the church, and then they began hacking dozens of the Tutsi congregants inside to death with machetes and clubs. Some Tutsis threw themselves onto their children in an attempt to spare them from the militants, but it was no use. Nobody was spared.
As the massacre took place, two unarmed UN soldiers simply stood by, watching the carnage unfold. One of them radioed headquarters and asked for an intervention force to be deployed, but this request was refused. Nobody would be sent to help the Tutsis, and the two UN soldiers were ordered not to use any force whatsoever to stop the massacre.
After two hours of killing the church's congregants, the Interahamwe burned the identity cards of the deceased and left. The two Polish priests, unharmed during the bloodshed, did their best to care for the gravely wounded and bury the dead.
More than 110 Tutsi civilians were butchered inside the church in Gikondo. It was one of the first major signs that a genocide was unfolding in Rwanda, but, still, the world took no action to stop it.
A few days later, the same Interahamwe group that massacred the Tutsis in the Gikondo church attacked a neighboring chapel just a few blocks down the road, where more than a dozen Tutsis were being cared for by a sympathetic Polish priest. After failing to enter the church, the Interahamwe doused it with gasoline and set the building on fire. There were no survivors.
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| Rwandan soldiers patrol Kigali as the civil war resumes, April 7th, 1994 |
The UN tried fruitlessly to restore order. Following Habyarimana's death, they tried to turn power over to Madame Agathe, a Hutu moderate appointed by the UN as Rwanda's acting prime minister. Madame Agathe and her two young sons resided in a fortified compound within Kigali, guarded by Belgian and Guinean UN Peacekeepers. As fighting raged through Kigali, the UN sought to protect Madame Agathe from harm. She was hidden in a closet within the compound as the UN peacekeepers assembled outside to wave off any intruders.
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| Agathe Uwilingiyimana, also known as Madame Agathe, was a Hutu moderate appointed by the UN as the Prime Minister of Rwanda. After the death of President Habyarimana, Agathe immediately became the target of the Hutu radicals, who sought to remove all moderates from the Rwandan government and install an extremist-led regime. |
At about 8:30 AM that morning, the compound was surrounded by a squad of Rwandan soldiers and members of the Akazu, a Hutu extremist militia that had acted as Habyarimana's personal guard. Immediately, the Rwandan soldiers began sporadically shooting at the compound and the UN Peacekeepers guarding it.
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| Madame Agathe took refuge in this compound as the civil war resumed in Kigali |
The UN peacekeepers radioed for instructions and asked if they could return the fire. After all, their mission was first and foremost to protect Prime Minister Agathe from harm. There was now a clear and present danger to that mission.
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| Rwandan soldiers begin to surround Madame Agathe's compound |
The stubbornness of the UN high command was now becoming very dangerous. Even now, with hopes for peace all but dashed, and with militants now attempting to kill the UN-appointed Prime Minister, the UN still was unwilling to use any force to stop the bloodshed unfolding before their eyes.
At about 9:00 AM, the Rwandan soldiers stormed Madame Agathe's compound, quickly encircling the UN Peacekeepers sent there to guard her. Once again, the UN peacekeepers radioed for instructions. The attackers were now inside the compound, and were heavily armed. Did they now have permission to use force to protect the prime minister?
Yet again, however, the response from the UN high command was "No". No use of force would be permitted. Unbelievably, the peacekeepers were ordered to try and negotiate with the assailants rather than take military action, and to try and talk them out of killing anybody.
With no way to stop the attackers, the UN peacekeepers had no choice but to surrender their weapons to the Rwandan army. The 15 Guinean peacekeepers were allowed by the militants to leave the compound, but the ten Belgian peacekeepers were held captive and marched away to Camp Kigali, a nearby Rwandan military base just down the road.
Inside a small wooden shack within the camp, the peacekeepers were forced to lie on the ground, where, as they screamed for help, they were hacked with machetes and bayonets by the Rwandan soldiers. General Dallaire was a few hundred yards away, and could hear his men crying out in agony.
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| This bullet-riddled building was where Dallaire's ten Belgian UN Peacekeepers were murdered by Rwandan soldiers. Today, the building remains preserved as a memorial. |
Dallaire radioed his superiors to ask for instructions. But, yet again, the UN command ordered him to not use any force against the attackers. He was to negotiate with the Rwandan leadership, and nothing more.
While Dallaire tried helplessly to negotiate, unable to help his men, the Rwandan militants bound and gagged the ten Belgian peacekeepers, lined them up against the wall, and methodically executed each of them with a shot to the head.
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| The bodies of the ten Belgian peacekeepers are removed from Camp Kigali, where they had been murdered by Rwandan soldiers |
The UN's stubborn non-interventionist strategy had just cost the lives of ten of their own men, but the worst was yet to come.
At 9:30 AM, the Rwandan soldiers discovered Madame Agathe hiding in a closet within her compound. With nobody to help her, she was dragged out into the open and, as she screamed in terror, she and her husband were shot dead.
Agathe's two young sons witnessed their mother's execution, but, miraculously, were not discovered and ultimately survived.
With Agathe's death, the last hope for a peaceful resolution was shattered. If there was any sign that peace was not an option, this was it. Action had to be taken before the situation got any worse.
But still, in an almost incomprehensible display of stubbornness, the UN refused to take any military action. This, in the end, would be a catastrophic mistake.
"Cut the Tall Trees"
As the UN stood by, unwilling to restore order to the carnage unfolding in Rwanda, the Hutu extremists quickly installed a new ruler to replace Habyarimana.
On April 9th, 1994, a "crisis committee" of Rwandan politicians installed a new ruling administration. Unlike Habyarimana, who had been forced to allow ethnic diversity within his cabinet, this administration consisted entirely of far-right Hutu extremists hell-bent on launching violence against the Tutsis.
In Habyarimana's place, the Hutu extremist leadership appointed Theodore Sindikubwabo, a former physician-turned-Hutu Power activist, to be Rwanda's president. Sindikubwabo, unlike his predecessor, openly advocated for the extermination of Tutsis.
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| Theodore Sindikubwabo, a far-right "Hutu Power" extremist, replaced Juvenal Habyarimana as President of Rwanda. |
To replace Madame Agathe, a Hutu extremist named Jean Kambanda was sworn in as the new Prime Minister of Rwanda. Kambanda was, even by MRND standards, an extreme right-wing Hutu nationalist. Like Sindikubwabo, Kambanda openly advocated for genocide against Rwanda's Tutsi population, and he was one of the principle organizers of the "Final Solution" to the "Tutsi problem".
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| Far-right Hutu extremist Jean Kambanda replaced Madame Agathe as Prime Minister of Rwanda. Here, Kambanda gives a speech to fellow Hutu extremists in which he calls for the extermination of "inyenzi", or "cockroaches". |
Kambanda and his chief-of-staff, a Rwandan military colonel named Theoneste Bagosora, had established a network of Interahamwe militias all across Rwanda in preparation for the "Final Solution". Bagosora, like Kambanda, was a far-right Hutu extremist, and he had vowed to unleash an "apocalypse" against the Tutsis.
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| Rwandan army officer and Hutu extremist Theoneste Bagosora served as Jean Kambanda's Chief of Staff. He had previously vowed to unleash an "apocalypse" against the Tutsi population in Rwanda. |
From the stations at the hate radio RTLM, the following message was broadcast: "Cut the tall trees!"
This innocuous-sounding message was actually a code word. Tutsis tended to be taller than their Hutu neighbors, so this message was the signal for the militias to begin their wholesale slaughter of the Tutsis. All across Rwanda, the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi, with the assistance of the Rwandan Army and other extremist Hutus, began to carry out mass killings of their Tutsi neighbors.
The genocide was now underway.
The Gikondo Massacre
The first large-scale massacre of the Rwandan genocide took place on April 9th, at a Polish mission in Gikondo, Rwanda. Two soldiers from the Presidential Guard, accompanied by two Rwandan gendarmes, entered the mission and ordered the more than 120 congregants to show their identity cards, which listed the bearer's ethnicity.
One of the Polish priests became angry. All of the worshipers were Christians, he said, and they were welcome in his church regardless of their ethnic background.
But the soldiers refused to leave. "You traitor!", yelled one of the gendarmes. "This church is harboring cockroaches!" He raised his rifle, but the Rwandan commander told him to stand down. "Don't waste your bullets!", he ordered. "The Interahamwe will deal with them."
Shortly afterwards, a band of 100 Interahamwe militiamen armed with clubs and machetes entered the church. Immediately, they led away the few Hutus in the church, and then they began hacking dozens of the Tutsi congregants inside to death with machetes and clubs. Some Tutsis threw themselves onto their children in an attempt to spare them from the militants, but it was no use. Nobody was spared.
As the massacre took place, two unarmed UN soldiers simply stood by, watching the carnage unfold. One of them radioed headquarters and asked for an intervention force to be deployed, but this request was refused. Nobody would be sent to help the Tutsis, and the two UN soldiers were ordered not to use any force whatsoever to stop the massacre.
After two hours of killing the church's congregants, the Interahamwe burned the identity cards of the deceased and left. The two Polish priests, unharmed during the bloodshed, did their best to care for the gravely wounded and bury the dead.
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| Victims of the Gikondo massacre lie dead outside the church |
More than 110 Tutsi civilians were butchered inside the church in Gikondo. It was one of the first major signs that a genocide was unfolding in Rwanda, but, still, the world took no action to stop it.
A few days later, the same Interahamwe group that massacred the Tutsis in the Gikondo church attacked a neighboring chapel just a few blocks down the road, where more than a dozen Tutsis were being cared for by a sympathetic Polish priest. After failing to enter the church, the Interahamwe doused it with gasoline and set the building on fire. There were no survivors.
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| Interahamwe fighters loot a home in Kigali after killing the Tutsi family occupying it, April 9, 1994. |
While
the killings began to unfold, the West finally decided to take military action.
But it was not to stop the genocide or to rescue the Tutsis. It was to get their own people out of Rwanda and leave the rest of the country to its fate.
As the killings began to spread across Rwanda, the governments of the United States, Belgium, and France decided to close their embassies and evacuate their citizens and diplomats from the country.
Within three days of the genocide beginning, more than 1500 French soldiers and US marines landed at Kigali International Airport. They set up defensive positions, placed snipers around the tarmac, and sent trucks of armed troops into Kigali towards the psychiatric hospital, where several western diplomats were trapped along with dozens of Tutsis hiding from the Interahamwe.
But it was not to stop the genocide or to rescue the Tutsis. It was to get their own people out of Rwanda and leave the rest of the country to its fate.
Abandoning Rwanda
As the killings began to spread across Rwanda, the governments of the United States, Belgium, and France decided to close their embassies and evacuate their citizens and diplomats from the country.
Within three days of the genocide beginning, more than 1500 French soldiers and US marines landed at Kigali International Airport. They set up defensive positions, placed snipers around the tarmac, and sent trucks of armed troops into Kigali towards the psychiatric hospital, where several western diplomats were trapped along with dozens of Tutsis hiding from the Interahamwe.
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| Belgian soldiers return fire after being shot at while caught in the middle of a firefight between Rwandan soldiers and the RPF. The Belgian and US soldiers sent to Rwanda took no action to stop the genocide, and promptly abandoned Rwanda once all foreign nationals has been evacuated. |
As they drove to the psychiatric hospital, the soldiers passed by dozens of Interahamwe militiamen waiting outside. Seeing the mass military presence, the Interahamwe briefly ceased their killing sprees and patiently waited for the soldiers to evacuate their civilians. The Interahamwe militias knew that the soldiers were not there to stop the genocide. They were not there to put an end to the killings. They would pick up their own people and leave. Once the soldiers were gone, the Interahamwe would be free to resume the genocide.
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| Armed Interahamwe fighters wait outside Kigali's psychiatric hospital as US troops arrive to pick up foreign civilians |
At the psychiatric hospital, the soldiers were immediately swarmed by Tutsi men, women, and children, who began relaying horrific stories of what was happening in their country. The Interahamwe had already butchered thousands of their friends and family, they said. They had surrounded the hospital, and were ready to storm it and kill the refugees once the foreign troops left.
But the begging and pleas for help did not sway the soldiers. They were under orders not to evacuate any Tutsi. They were not to get involved in Rwanda's armed conflict.
When it became clear that the soldiers would not help them, the Tutsi refugees instead turned to the journalists, who were filming the entire scene. They began pleading and begging the journalists to save them from a certain death. The foreigners, said the refugees, were the only things standing between them and the Interahamwe.
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| Tutsi civilians taking refuge in Kigali's psychiatric hospital plead with journalists and foreign troops to save them from the Interahamwe. Their pleas were ignored, and, minutes after this picture was taken, these refugees would be slaughtered by the Hutu militias waiting outside. |
But the journalists were also instructed not to evacuate any Tutsi civilians. They, too, were told not to get involved in Rwanda's conflicts. Their only job was to film and answer questions.
So, once the foreign diplomats were evacuated, the soldiers and journalists climbed back into their trucks and departed the hospital. Not a single Tutsi man, woman, or child accompanied them. The hundreds of refugees hiding at the hospital were left to fend for themselves.
After the troops and journalists returned to Kigali Airport, the Interahamwe militias entered the hospital and began machine-gunning the Tutsi civilians gathered there. The foreign soldiers heard the gunfire, but not a single one of them decided to turn around and stop the militias. Nobody lifted a finger. Nobody turned around to help. They simply abandoned the Tutsis, leaving them prey to certain death.
By April 10th, 1994, three days after the genocide began, there were less than ten foreign citizens left in Rwanda. While the rest of the world issued strong statements of condemnation to the Rwandan government, not a single one of them took any action to stop the bloodshed.
Genocide
With all foreign troops evacuated from Rwanda, and only a small UN peacekeeping force left behind with orders not to use any military force, the Rwandan government now had no obstacles standing in the way of their genocidal plans.
As the rest of the world stood by, watching and doing nothing, the extremist Hutu leadership set into motion the next phase of their plan.
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| An Interahamwe militiaman with a machete mans a roadblock in Kigali. The roadblocks enabled Hutu militias to systematically identify and exterminate Tutsis and moderate Hutus who had been marked for death. |
The Interahamwe, assisted by the Rwandan Army, set up roadblocks in major cities throughout Rwanda. Anyone who passed through had to show their national ID cards, which listed their ethnicity. This enabled the militias to be able to systematically identify and kill Tutsis and any Hutu moderates.
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| An Interahamwe fighter holding a machete (left) stands amidst the corpses of murdered Tutsis. |
Vile, racist, and anti-Tutsi propaganda flooded the airwaves as the genocide began. From his desk at RTLM, Froduald Karamira broadcast loud messages of hate to spur on the militias.
"All Tutsis shall perish! They shall vanish from the earth! Slowly, we shall kill them like rats!", Karamira snarled into the radio. "Get to work and kill the cockroaches!", he continued. "The cockroaches' cruelty is incurable, and the only remedy is extermination! Kill them all! Totally wipe them out!"
An excerpt of the vile hate propaganda broadcast over the airwaves of RTLM during the genocide.
All across Rwanda, the Interahamwe began their bloody campaign of ethnic cleansing. Tutsi villages were burned to the ground. Civilians were machine-gunned by the militias as police and Rwandan soldiers watched or, worse, participated in the killings. Babies and children were hacked to death with machetes, clubs, hatchets, and axes, and their bodies were thrown into ever-growing mounds of corpses.
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| Interahamwe militiamen on patrol |
The killings in Rwanda generally followed a simple, yet consistent, pattern. The militias, composed of young, hardened Hutu men and boys itching for violence, would arrive at a targeted village where Tutsis were known to reside. The militiamen would be handed weapons, such as clubs, guns, axes, or machetes, and would be told to use them on any Tutsi they found.
The militias would burn the houses in a village to flush out the occupants and, when their victims were out in the open, the Interahamwe would indiscriminately begin shooting, stabbing, slashing, and hacking away at anything that moved. In some cases, Tutsi civilians, horrified at the thought of dying by machete, paid the Hutu militants to shoot them rather than hack them to death.
The killings were indiscriminate. Nobody's life was spared and nobody was safe. Everyone, from infants to the elderly, from the physically strong to the mentally disabled, was brutally slaughtered. If any militiaman refused to partake in the killing, he, too, would be immediately killed on the spot and thrown in with the rest of the victims.
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| Interahamwe militiamen (center-left) hack Tutsi children to death with machetes outside Kigali. This is a still photo from footage discreetly recorded by UN observers. |
The bodies of those murdered were piled into trucks to be driven away or, in other cases, simply bulldozed into huge mounds. Sometimes, nobody would bother to move the corpses. They would just be left to rot on the ground where they fell.
Once a village was destroyed, the militias would regroup and head on to the next one to begin the killing cycle all over again. In this way, entire communities were eradicated, and whole families were literally erased from existence.
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| Hundreds of victims of the Rwandan Genocide lie dead outside a destroyed village near Nyanza, Rwanda. The Interahamwe's massacres were indiscriminate, ruthless, and brutal. |
The most striking thing about the Rwandan genocide is how unorganized it was. While the genocide was, in fact, intricately planned, organized, and ordered by the Hutu extremist leadership, when it came down to the massacres themselves there was no strategy or order to the killing.
During the Holocaust, the Nazis created an almost factory-like method for carrying out their genocide. They had protocols for gas chambers, kept tallies of those they murdered, meticulously recorded their mass killings, and filled in daily quotas that they set.
But this was not the case in Rwanda. This genocide was completely different. There were no protocols, no quotas, no instructions, no rules and no regulations.
Far from the industrialized mass killings seen during the Holocaust, the slaughter in Rwanda was primitive, savage, chaotic, unorganized, and brutal. It revealed the true depths of human depravity.
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| A partial list of the massacres that took place during the Rwandan genocide. Churches were often targeted by the Interahamwe due to the large numbers of Tutsi refugees there. |
Bloodbath in Nyarubuye
On April 15th, one of the most horrific acts of the Rwandan genocide took place in the district of Nyarubuye, in Eastern Rwanda.
More than 5000 Tutsi men, women, and children had fled from the advancing Interahamwe and had taken refuge inside Nyarubuye's Roman Catholic Church, a giant house of worship which many believed would be a safe haven. The Tutsi refugees knew that the Hutus were devout Catholics, and they believed that the Interahamwe would never dare to attack a church.
But this was a fatal miscalculation, and it was amplified when the governor of Nyarubuye, Sylvestre Gacumbizi, himself a radical Hutu, informed the Interahamwe of the thousands of Tutsis taking refuge inside the church.
Immediately, squads of Rwandan soldiers and Interahamwe militiamen began surrounding the building, trapping the Tutsi refugees inside. Governor Gacumbizi entered the church, accompanied by a band of Rwandan soldiers and police officers, to talk to the Tutsis inside. At first, some believed he was there to stop the militias from killing people, but this, too, was a miscalculation.
Gacumbizi announced to the Tutsis that they were enemies of Rwanda and were to be immediately exterminated. As he left, the Rwandan soldiers turned their machine guns on the thousands of Tutsi refugees and opened fire, blindly shooting at anything and everything in sight.
The Tutsi refugees bravely fought back. Unarmed, they could only throw rocks and furniture at the soldiers. But it was no use. They were simply cut down by the relentless spray of gunfire.
The Interahamwe soon entered the church and immediately began hacking the Tutsi survivors to death with machetes and axes. Nobody was spared from the slaughter. Men and women, infants and the elderly, children and adults - all were butchered by the Interahamwe, who ignored their pleas and cries for mercy.
Babies were burned alive as their parents were forced to watch. Women and girls were gang-raped and then shot or decapitated. Children had their limbs hacked off and were left to bleed to death among the ever-growing pile of corpses. The elderly were beaten, shot, and stomped to death by the militias. There was no order to the massacre. It was complete, unbridled, ruthless carnage.
One Hutu militiaman would later recall "We were not ourselves. It was as if we were taken over by Satan."
After an hour or so of shooting, hacking, and beating the Tutsi refugees to death, the Interahamwe simply ran out of people to kill. They piled some of the bodies on the lawn of the church, set the altar on fire, and departed, leaving behind a scene of utter carnage.
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| Corpses of Tutsi civilians lie piled outside the church in Nyarubuye. It was one of the worst massacres during the Rwandan genocide. |
Throughout the slaughter, a 12-year-old Tutsi girl, Valentina Iribagiza, lay still under the mutilated corpses of her friends and family. She'd lost four fingers to an attacker's machete, and was covered with so much blood that the militiamen never realized she was alive.
One Hutu militiaman stepped on her body as he walked among the corpses. Examining her and seeing her covered with blood, he assumed that Valentina had been killed. "This thing is dead!", he laughed to his comrades as he left the church.
Of the 5,000 Tutsis taking refuge inside the church at Nyarubuye, less than ten survived. After the Interahamwe left, Valentina hid in a closet within the church. She stayed there among the rotting corpses of her friends and family for 43 days.
"They are Killing my People!"
As word of the unfolding genocide spread across Rwanda, the RPF declared the ceasefire and the peace process dead. Immediately, the RPF's leader, Paul Kagame, ordered that the rebels resume their offensive against the Rwandan government. The rebels emerged from the demilitarized zone and immediately engaged in combat with the Rwandan army.
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| RPF soldiers fire artillery shells at government forces during intense fighting near Byumba, Rwanda, in April 1994. |
Kagame ordered a three-pronged offensive aimed at Kigali. Because the Rwandan army was so focused on carrying out their genocide against the Tutsi, Kagame calculated that the government would be ill-prepared to resist his offensive. His intuition was correct. The Rwandan army was caught completely off-balance by the sudden RPF advance, and, by the end of April, the rebels had secured the entire Rwandan-Tanzanian border.
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| RPF fighters engage in combat with Rwandan government soldiers in April, 1994, after resuming their offensive |
Unbelievably, as the RPF battled their way south towards Kigali, officials from the UN and US demanded that Kagame halt his offensive and continue working towards a peaceful resolution. Even though any hopes for peace were shattered, the rest of the world simply refused to accept what was happening. They were still stubbornly convinced that military action was not necessary.
In fact, during the genocide, the UN and US tried to negotiate with the Hutu extremists themselves in order to end the mass slaughter. The US Deputy Assistant Secretary for the State of Africa, Prudence Bushnell, frequently called President Sindikubwabo and Prime Minister Kambanda and told them to stop the killings.
Because of the US government's strict non-interventionist foreign policy, Bushnell had no way to enforce her demands. All she could do was use words.
During the genocide, Bushnell also had frequent phone conversations with Kagame. Bushnell was ordered to convince Kagame to halt his advance and negotiate with the Hutu government, and she tried for several days to do so. Kagame would have none of it. He found it almost comically outlandish that the US thought the killings would be stopped through negotiations. That time, he said, was past.
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| Paul Kagame talks with Secretary Bushnell over the phone |
Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Bushnell continued to insist that peace was possible, and continued to press Kagame to halt his offensive and re-enter negotiations. Violence, she said, was not the answer to the killings.
Finally, after several fruitless calls, Kagame lost his composure. He was fed up with the rest of the world standing by and allowing the genocide to happen.
"Madame, they are killing my people!!!", he angrily shouted into the phone. "I cannot wait any longer!"
Willful Ignorance
As the RPF pushed south towards Kigali, they came across evidence of the atrocities the Interahamwe-led government had committed against the Tutsis. Burned-out villages pockmarked the government-controlled areas. Hundreds of thousands of hacked corpses littered the roadways, and some rebels later recalled that the roads looked like they had been paved with bodies. And that was only a small glimpse into the horror that was going on in the rest of the country.
The entire world now had ample evidence that a mass genocide was underway in Rwanda. Several Tutsi survivors who had been smuggled out of Rwanda bravely testified before the US Congress about the horrors taking place in their country. They urged the US to do something - anything - to put an end to the bloodshed.
But, even now, the non-interventionist US government still refused to take any action whatsoever. Even when the suggestion came up that the US could jam Rwandan radio frequencies to interrupt the hate radio broadcasts from RTLM, that idea was immediately shot down and criticized as an "undemocratic" solution. In fact, the US government even refused to officially term the events in Rwanda as a genocide.
On April 28th, 1994, as the massacres and atrocities raged on relentlessly, US State Department Spokeswoman Christine Shelly gave a press conference in Washington, DC, about the situation in Rwanda. Although she condemned the violence in Rwanda, she maintained her government's strict policy of non-interventionism.
"Could what is happening in Rwanda be termed a genocide?", asked a reporter.
"Well, as I think you know, the use of the term 'genocide' has a very precise legal meaning", Shelly responded, evading the question. "There are other factors in there as well".
Similarly, at a press conference several days later, the American ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, also refused to endorse a military intervention into Rwanda, even though the UN had conventions against genocide.
"Just out of curiosity", asked a reporter, "given that so many people say that there is a genocide underway, why has this convention not been invoked?"
Like Shelly, Ambassador Albright simply evaded the question. "Well, I think, as you know, this becomes a legal definitional thing", she replied. "As horrendous as these things are, this becomes a definitional question."
It was abundantly clear that, even in the face of so much evidence that a horrific genocide was underway in Rwanda, there was still no incentive whatsoever on the part of the US, UN, or the rest of the world to intervene.
Later, Ambassador Albright would claim that the UN had little to no knowledge of what was occurring in Rwanda. The information was too murky, she claimed, and it wasn't clear that a humanitarian crisis of such a large scale was occurring.
But this was simply not the case. As a Red Cross employee who worked in Rwanda during the genocide later recalled: "They cannot tell us that they didn't know. They were told every day what was happening there. So don't come back and tell me 'Sorry, we didn't know' - No! They knew. Everybody knew."
Heroism in the Face of Evil
While the rest of the world did nothing to stop the killings in Rwanda, some citizens, volunteers, and activists took it upon themselves to save as many people as they could. They, unlike the rest of the world, decided not to stand by and do nothing.
The Hotel Milles Collines, a five-star resort in Kigali which housed international diplomats, became a safe haven for Tutsi refugees fleeing the Interahamwe. The hotel's house manager, Paul Rusesabagina, was a Hutu moderate and provided safe refuge for Tutsis fleeing the extremist Hutu death squads. Despite receiving numerous death threats from Rwandan soldiers and Interahamwe militants, and despite coming under nearly constant armed attack from the extremists, Rusesabagina managed to rescue and shelter more than 1,200 Tutsi and Hutu civilians in his hotel, bribing or warding off the Interahamwe death squads from entering the building for nearly two months.
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| The Hotel Milles Collines, a luxury resort in Kigali, became a refuge center for more than 1200 Tutsis during the Rwandan Genocide |
One UN soldier in Kigali, a Senegalese military officer named Mbaye Diagne, also took matters into his own hands. Diagne had been ordered by his superiors not to launch any rescue missions to save Tutsi civilians, but, distraught at what he saw unfolding in Rwanda, Diagne decided to go against orders. He was willing to risk a court-martial in order to do what he knew was right.
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| UN captain Mbaye Diagne disobeyed orders and risked his own life to save as many Tutsis as he could from the Interahamwe during the genocide |
Diagne got word from refugees that hundreds of Tutsi civilians were hiding in various locations throughout Kigali. Unable to gather a UN rescue squad, Diagne commandeered a UN van and, for several days, drove throughout Kigali, evading the Interahamwe roadblocks, and personally rescued Tutsi civilians. He placed them in the back of his van, covered them with blankets, and surreptitiously drove them back to his UN base, which the Interahamwe avoided. His goal was to save as many people as he could until the RPF arrived and reveal to the world the atrocities that were unfolding in Rwanda.
On May 31st, 1994, while on one of his rescue missions, Diagne stopped his van at an Interahamwe roadblock. Because he knew Hutu customs and because he often bribed the Interahamwe with cigars, Diagne had usually been able to pass through the checkpoints without much trouble.
But, this time, he would never make it through.
As Diagne waited to pass through the checkpoint, the Interahamwe roadblock came under mortar fire from an RPF detachment, and an intense gun battle developed. During the exchange of fire, a stray RPF mortar exploded behind Diagne's truck, sending shrapnel tearing through the back of his skull and killing the 36-year-old peacekeeper and father of two instantly. Diagne was just two weeks shy of returning home to Senegal.
At the cost of his own life, Diagne had bravely managed to save between 500 and 1,000 lives.
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| Captain Mbaye Diagne was killed during the Battle of Kigali on May 31st, 1994, while on one of his rescue missions. He alone managed to save nearly 1000 lives. |
There were other UN soldiers who went out of their way to save as many Tutsis as they could. Stefan Stec, a Polish UN peacekeeper who had witnessed the massacre in Gikondo, took it upon himself to establish "safe zones" in Kigali's sports stadiums where he would shelter Tutsi refugees.
Stec managed to organize a small group of peacekeepers and volunteers who organized and led rescue missions that corralled thousands of displaced Tutsis and sheltered them in sports stadiums, hotels, and other structures deemed "secure" by the UN.
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| Thousands of Tutsi refugees managed to take refuge in this church, which was declared a UN "safe zone" |
Although he was not allowed to use military force, Stec stretched the limits of his restraints. He would often brandish his service weapon whenever the Interahamwe would harass his convoys. Often, merely drawing his gun was enough to deter the Interahamwe from attacking the rescue missions, and it allowed him to pass more easily through the militia roadblocks.
On one occasion, a detachment of Rwandan soldiers and Interahamwe militiamen stopped one of his rescue convoys at a roadblock and ordered all occupants out at gunpoint. Violating orders from his superiors to not use force, Stec and his men drew their own weapons and aimed them right back at their assailants. After a tense standoff, the Interahamwe released the convoy and allowed it to continue forward without killing anyone.
There were countless other acts of bravery shown by individuals in Rwanda, who took it upon themselves to save as many innocent people as they could.
When confronted with evil, these people stood up for what they knew to be right. They didn't back down or ignore what was happening. They didn't diffuse responsibility onto others or sit back and watch like the rest of the world did. They stood up in the face of evil, and did their best to make a difference for the better.
In all, these private citizens probably saved more lives in Rwanda than the entire western world did combined.
The Battle of Kigali
By the end of April, 1994, close to 500,000 Tutsis had already been slaughtered by the Interahamwe, and the genocide showed no signs of stopping. The neighboring country of Tanzania was also dealing with a massive refugee crisis, as over 1.3 million Rwandan civilians flooded over the border to escape the violence in their home country.
However, as the Rwandan government and its death squads focused on the genocide, the RPF scored numerous tactical victories as Paul Kagame, ignoring the orders of the UN to stand down, pressed on towards Kigali.
Kagame knew that negotiating with the Hutu extremists was no longer an option. The only way to stop the killings was to wrestle power away from Kambanda's extremist government.
By May 3rd, 1994, the RPF had advanced all the way to the outskirts of Kigali, and they prepared to take the capital city.
Up to this point, the rebels had only met scattered resistance from the Rwandan army, but that would change. A massive amount of Rwandan soldiers and Interahamwe militiamen set up a defensive perimeter around Kigali and halted the rebel advance in its tracks. Government forces bombarded the RPF with heavy mortar fire throughout the morning, forcing the rebels to dig in for a siege.
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| RPF fighters outside Kigali in early May, 1994 |
Throughout the day on May 3rd, specialist units from the Rwandan Army and the Presidential Guard engaged in intense combat with the RPF. The two sides traded shellfire for hours, leaving much of the northern part of Kigali in ruins.
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| RPF rebels fire at government forces outside Kigali |
By May 4th, however, the RPF had managed to break through the perimeter. What followed was a house-to-house urban war between the Rwandan army and the RPF. It soon became clear that the rebels would eventually take the city.
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| A Rwandan armored personnel carrier lies abandoned during the Battle of Kigali |
With the RPF already attacking Kigali, Kambanda relocated the central government farther south to Gitarama, and ordered the Interahamwe to accelerate the killings of the Tutsis. He wanted to eradicate as many of them as he could in the time he had left.
Even in the face of imminent defeat, the Rwandan government was so blinded by hate, and so consumed with nationalistic fury, that they simply could not stop killing people. Their hatred for the Tutsis was unquenchable. From their desks at RTLM, the Hutu extremist leadership urged the militias to continue their massacres. "Keep going to work!", the pundits announced over the radio. "The graves are not yet full!".
On May 5th, the Interahamwe began to increase the pace of its killings against the Tutsis, attacking UN "safe zones" and systematically hunting down and exterminating any Tutsi civilians they found inside. In the southern town of Butare, for instance, Interahamwe militants brazenly stormed into an orphanage staffed by the Red Cross - ostensibly a "safe zone" - and mercilessly slaughtered 21 children and 13 Red Cross volunteers inside. When UN doctors tried to tend to the wounded victims, they were gunned down by Rwandan soldiers.
Even the Rwandan army, which had worked hard to publicly distance themselves from the Hutu militias, became openly involved in the killings. Rwandan artillery began shelling the UN-controlled stadiums in Kigali, attempting to kill the Tutsi refugees hiding inside. The UN peacekeepers, of course, were not permitted to return the fire.
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| Rwandan soldiers battle Tutsi rebels in the closing weeks of the civil war |
Rwandan soldiers set up machine gun nests and outposts along major roads, openly flying the government flag for all to see, and indiscriminately gunned down throngs of fleeing Tutsi civilians as they retreated from the advancing Interahamwe.
Even when UN convoys tried to funnel refugees through the roadblocks, they were halted by Rwandan soldiers, who forced all occupants out of their vehicles and massacred them on the spot.
By May 16th, the RPF had successfully navigated around the Rwandan army's defensive perimeter, and captured the road connecting Kigali to Gitarama, where the government had relocated. With Kigali now essentially surrounded, the RPF began their advance into the city, exchanging artillery and gunfire with the Rwandan soldiers left inside. Kigali would quickly become the site of the harshest fighting in the entire war.
The imminent rebel threat put a halt to the mass killings of the Tutsis in Kigali, and forced the death squads and soldiers to focus on defending the city from the RPF onslaught. Prime Minister Kambanda gave an impassioned speech over the airwaves from RTLM, urging all "patriotic Rwandans" to take up arms in a "mass mobilization" and "unite against the cockroach menace".
By May 16th, the RPF had successfully navigated around the Rwandan army's defensive perimeter, and captured the road connecting Kigali to Gitarama, where the government had relocated. With Kigali now essentially surrounded, the RPF began their advance into the city, exchanging artillery and gunfire with the Rwandan soldiers left inside. Kigali would quickly become the site of the harshest fighting in the entire war.
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| Smoke rises as RPF forces shell Rwandan Army positions in Kigali, May 15th, 1994 |
The imminent rebel threat put a halt to the mass killings of the Tutsis in Kigali, and forced the death squads and soldiers to focus on defending the city from the RPF onslaught. Prime Minister Kambanda gave an impassioned speech over the airwaves from RTLM, urging all "patriotic Rwandans" to take up arms in a "mass mobilization" and "unite against the cockroach menace".
In any case, by this point, the Interahamwe had slaughtered so many Tutsis that they were now running out of people to kill.
Heavy fighting raged through Kigali throughout the rest of the week as the RPF and Rwandan army battled for control of the city. Through a brutal house-to-house and street-by-street campaign of urban warfare, the RPF gradually wore down the Rwandan army's defenses as it pushed towards the city center.
On May 22nd, 1994, the RPF managed to capture Kigali Airport and the Rwandan army barracks at Camp Kanombe after over a week of heavy fighting. With the airport secured, the rebels had cut off the Rwandan government's last remaining supply line, and over 4,000 Rwandan Army soldiers defending the garrison surrendered or deserted their ranks.
The following day, on May 23rd, the rebels captured the Presidential Palace after a day of trading rocket and mortar fire with the Presidential Guard. However, although they now had a solid foothold in Kigali, the RPF still faced stubborn resistance from the Rwandan army throughout the rest of the city.
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| An RPF fighter searches the Presidential Palace after its capture. |
Negotiating with the Devil
At this point, the UN feared having their peacekeepers become caught in the crossfire between the rebels and the government. They began to once again attempt talks for a ceasefire, and asked General Dallaire if he could meet with the leaders of the Interahamwe to discuss negotiations.
Dallaire contacted Theoneste Bagosora, who invited him to a Kigali hotel to talk with the Interahamwe commanders. At the hotel, Bagosora warmly introduced Dallaire to the militia commanders.
But, as Dallaire shook the hands of the militia leaders, he noticed that they were covered with dried blood and flesh. Even now, with the rebel army at their doorstep, Dallaire could see that the Interahamwe were still relentlessly butchering people.
"All of a sudden, they disappeared from being human", Dallaire later recalled "And I was no longer talking with humans. I was literally talking with evil. I was negotiating with the Devil"
The peace talks ended up being completely fruitless. Unable to convince the Interahamwe to halt their killing sprees, Dallaire ordered all UN troops to guard the few remaining "safe zones" in Kigali.
Negotiations, he realized, simply wouldn't work.
On May 26th, 1994, six weeks into the genocide, the UN finally decided to take action, and authorized a deployment of 5000 UN peacekeepers into Rwanda to assist Dallaire's tattered force. But, unfortunately, no peacekeepers were immediately available for deployment. It was estimated that an intervention force could take three months to organize, and Rwanda was running out of time.
As before, the RPF would have to take matters into their own hands.
Kigali Falls: The End of a Nightmare
As the UN Security Council bickered over whether to intervene, the RPF continued to press forward, determined to take out the Rwandan leadership and put a halt to the killings for good.
On June 2nd, the RPF advanced further south and began to attack the town of Kabgayi, where Hutu militias, spurred on by anti-Tutsi Catholic bishops, had already butchered nearly 64,000 Tutsi civilians.
After two days of fighting, the RPF seized the village and found evidence of the Interahamwe's massacres. Several members of the RPF had lived in Kabgayi, and found their friends and families murdered and lying in mass graves.
Appalled by the atrocities, the RPF fighters turned on their Hutu captives and, in a fit of rage, executed at least 64 of them, including 11 Catholic priests and a well-known Catholic bishop who served as a committee chairman for the MRND.
As fighting raged on in Kigali, the RPF finally managed to encircle Gitarama, where the Rwandan leadership had been trapped due to the siege.
On June 6th, 1994, the Rwandan Army launched a counterattack and attacked the RPF entrenchments surrounding Gitarama. An intense gun battle ensued, with both sides trading fire for several days before the Rwandan Army was finally forced to retreat back into the city, pursued by a large force of RPF fighters.
However, the counterattack had allowed the Rwandan leadership to escape from Gitarama and flee northwest to the city of Gisenyi, where the mass killings of Tutsis continued.
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| Rwandan soldiers fire a heavy machine gun at RPF rebels northwest of Gitarama, June 12, 1994 |
After several more days of heavy fighting between the RPF and the Rwandan government, Gitarama surrendered to the rebels on June 13th. The remnants of the Rwandan Army garrison retreated northwest with the RPF in hot pursuit. Kagame proudly declared to the world that he had the Hutu regime on the run.
Back in Kigali, the RPF had managed to flank the Rwandan Army and corner them in the city center. On June 15th, following a brief, failed ceasefire, the RPF began shelling the city square and resumed their offensive to take the capital.
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| Rwandan soldiers and Interahamwe militiamen wounded by RPF mortar fire are evacuated during a lull in the fighting in Kigali. |
It was at this point that France finally decided to send its military into Rwanda. In late June of 1994, they initiated "Operation Turquoise", the code name for the deployment of over 5000 French soldiers to southern Rwanda.
But, as before, it was not to stop the genocide that was still underway. The French government still remained hostile to the RPF, and the purpose of Operation Turquoise was to protect certain Rwandan regions from the rebel onslaught and to prop up the endangered Hutu regime, which still remained friendly to France.
The French army secured "safe zones" across southern Rwanda and supplied the Rwandan Army with fresh equipment and weaponry. Even though France was well aware of the genocide underway in Rwanda, they took no action to stop it.
Operation Turquoise put an end to the RPF's southward advance, but its attempt to assist the embattled Hutu regime ultimately failed. Much of the Rwandan Army lay in tatters, caught off-guard by the speedy RPF assault.
Whether the French liked it or not, Kagame and the RPF now had the genocidal regime in a chokehold, and they were ready to bring it down.
On July 4th, 1994, nearly three months after the genocide began, the remnants of the Rwandan garrison in Kigali finally surrendered. The rebels had captured the capital city and had cut the regime's territory in half. For the extremist Hutu regime, defeat was now inevitable.
Even now, the mass killings by the Interahamwe still continued as the RPF overwhelmed the last remnants of the Rwandan army. The rebels advanced northwest to attack the government's final stronghold in Gisenyi, where the Rwandan leadership was holed up.
On July 14th, the RPF surrounded and invaded Gisenyi, meeting only feeble resistance. Realizing all was lost, the Hutu extremist leadership scattered in different directions. Prime Minister Jean Kambanda, President Theodore Sindikubwabo, Froduald Karamira, and Chief of Staff Theoneste Bagosora all fled across the border into neighboring Zaire, where they took refuge.
But, as before, it was not to stop the genocide that was still underway. The French government still remained hostile to the RPF, and the purpose of Operation Turquoise was to protect certain Rwandan regions from the rebel onslaught and to prop up the endangered Hutu regime, which still remained friendly to France.
The French army secured "safe zones" across southern Rwanda and supplied the Rwandan Army with fresh equipment and weaponry. Even though France was well aware of the genocide underway in Rwanda, they took no action to stop it.
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| French soldiers arrive in southern Rwanda as part of Operation Turquoise. They never took any action to stop the genocide against the Tutsis. |
Operation Turquoise put an end to the RPF's southward advance, but its attempt to assist the embattled Hutu regime ultimately failed. Much of the Rwandan Army lay in tatters, caught off-guard by the speedy RPF assault.
Whether the French liked it or not, Kagame and the RPF now had the genocidal regime in a chokehold, and they were ready to bring it down.
On July 4th, 1994, nearly three months after the genocide began, the remnants of the Rwandan garrison in Kigali finally surrendered. The rebels had captured the capital city and had cut the regime's territory in half. For the extremist Hutu regime, defeat was now inevitable.
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| RPF fighters celebrate in the streets after capturing Kigali |
Even now, the mass killings by the Interahamwe still continued as the RPF overwhelmed the last remnants of the Rwandan army. The rebels advanced northwest to attack the government's final stronghold in Gisenyi, where the Rwandan leadership was holed up.
On July 14th, the RPF surrounded and invaded Gisenyi, meeting only feeble resistance. Realizing all was lost, the Hutu extremist leadership scattered in different directions. Prime Minister Jean Kambanda, President Theodore Sindikubwabo, Froduald Karamira, and Chief of Staff Theoneste Bagosora all fled across the border into neighboring Zaire, where they took refuge.
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| A Rwandan armored car lies destroyed on the side of a road in July, 1994, following a battle with RPF forces in Gisenyi. Gisenyi was the last town in Rwanda to be liberated by the RPF - a full three months after the genocide began. |
On July 15th, 1994, the RPF crushed the last remnants of the Rwandan army and captured Gisenyi. By July 17th, the entire country of Rwanda, save for the French-controlled southern regions, was under rebel control. Thousands of Interahamwe fighters, Rwandan soldiers, and Hutu extremists, fearing reprisals from the RPF, fled en-masse to neighboring countries. Many of them still remain there to this day.
The Rwandan genocide and civil war finally came to an end on July 18th, 1994, when the last remnants of the Hutu extremist government were defeated. The mass killings of Tutsis by the extremists had lasted for just over 100 days, but the cost was staggering. All across Rwanda, piles of rotting, mutilated corpses littered the roads. Entire families, communities, and villages were eradicated, and the whole country was changed forever.
The true death toll of the Rwandan genocide will never be known. Because whole villages were eradicated, often with no survivors, any trace of their existence was literally wiped from the earth.
In all, taking into account the dead and the missing, it is believed that nearly one million people - 800,000 Tutsis and 250,000 Twas, Kigas, and moderate Hutus - were butchered by the death squads of the Interahamwe, Impuzamugambi, Akazu, and the Rwandan military.
The rate of killing during the genocide was, and still remains, the largest in recorded human history, with a death rate more than five times that of the Holocaust.
The genocide wiped out more than 70% of Rwanda's Tutsis and 30% of Rwanda's Twas, dramatically changing the country's ethnic demographics for generations to come.
But the costs of the Rwandan genocide still continue to plague Africa to this day.
During the Rwandan genocide, over 500,000 Tutsi women and girls were raped by the Interahamwe. The mass rapes led to a massive HIV epidemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people in central Africa. Even today, that HIV epidemic is still ongoing and continues to kill thousands each year.
Following the genocide, thousands of Hutu extremists fled across the border into neighboring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Tanzania, and Burundi. The Interahamwe, though severely diminished in size, reestablished its base in the Congo and, to this day, it continues to wage war against ethnic Tutsis in the African Great Lakes Region.
The Price of Evil
The Rwandan genocide and civil war finally came to an end on July 18th, 1994, when the last remnants of the Hutu extremist government were defeated. The mass killings of Tutsis by the extremists had lasted for just over 100 days, but the cost was staggering. All across Rwanda, piles of rotting, mutilated corpses littered the roads. Entire families, communities, and villages were eradicated, and the whole country was changed forever.
The true death toll of the Rwandan genocide will never be known. Because whole villages were eradicated, often with no survivors, any trace of their existence was literally wiped from the earth.
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| A young Tutsi girl stands among thousands of dead victims of the Rwandan genocide. In total, over 1,000,000 Tutsis, Twas, Kigas, and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by the Interahamwe death squads. |
In all, taking into account the dead and the missing, it is believed that nearly one million people - 800,000 Tutsis and 250,000 Twas, Kigas, and moderate Hutus - were butchered by the death squads of the Interahamwe, Impuzamugambi, Akazu, and the Rwandan military.
The rate of killing during the genocide was, and still remains, the largest in recorded human history, with a death rate more than five times that of the Holocaust.
The genocide wiped out more than 70% of Rwanda's Tutsis and 30% of Rwanda's Twas, dramatically changing the country's ethnic demographics for generations to come.
But the costs of the Rwandan genocide still continue to plague Africa to this day.
During the Rwandan genocide, over 500,000 Tutsi women and girls were raped by the Interahamwe. The mass rapes led to a massive HIV epidemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people in central Africa. Even today, that HIV epidemic is still ongoing and continues to kill thousands each year.
Following the genocide, thousands of Hutu extremists fled across the border into neighboring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Tanzania, and Burundi. The Interahamwe, though severely diminished in size, reestablished its base in the Congo and, to this day, it continues to wage war against ethnic Tutsis in the African Great Lakes Region.
The mass influx of Hutu refugees from Rwanda into Zaire would also lead to the beginning of a violent, seven-year-long sectarian conflict as different ethnic militias and governments battled amongst each other for control of central Africa. More than 6,000,000 people would die in the Congo Wars - the deadliest conflict in the world since the Second World War - and over 2,000,000 others would be displaced. Even today, insurgencies resulting from the Congo Wars continue to wreck havoc in the regions of Ituri, North Kivu, Goma, and the Central African Republic.
Other Hutus who had fled Rwanda joined the Allied Democratic Forces, an Islamist rebel group in northeastern DR Congo that has been described as one of the greatest security threats in central Africa. The ADF have launched attacks on UN peacekeepers and civilians alike, and their constant attacks on aid workers have hampered recent efforts to contain outbreaks of the Ebola virus, leading to thousands of deaths and enabling the disease to spread like wildfire.
The ramifications of Rwanda did not end in July, 1994. They are still ongoing today, products of hatred, fear, racism, and an unwillingness to stop the worst mass genocide in recent history.
In November of 1994, the International Criminal Court (ICC) formed the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, a tribunal that aimed to charge the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide in international court with war crimes, genocide, mass murder, and crimes against humanity.
Arrest warrants were issued by both the ICTR and Rwandan government, seeking information on the Hutu extremists who had masterminded the genocide. More than 100,000 people were arrested in connection with the mass killings, many of them suspected Interahamwe members.
Froduald Karamira, the MDR's vice president who gave daily speeches urging Hutus to kill their Tutsi neighbors, was one of the first major genocidaires to be apprehended. In 1996, after two years on the run, Karamira was arrested in Mumbai, India, and deported to Ethiopia, where he had previously taken refuge.
After an extradition standoff between the ICTR and Rwandan government, the Ethiopian government sent Karamira to Kigali to stand trial in a Rwandan court for murder, genocide, and crimes against humanity.
Karamira's trial began in Kigali on January 14th, 1997. Though Karamira maintained his innocence - asserting that the genocide had "never occurred" and that he was being framed for political reasons - prosecutors accused Karamira of not only orchestrating the genocide, but even personally participating in the killings of Tutsis. Among the evidence against Karamira were recordings of his speeches, eyewitness accounts by genocide survivors, and testimony from some of Karamira's accomplices, who told of Karamira personally killing at least 13 members of his Tutsi family.
Other Hutus who had fled Rwanda joined the Allied Democratic Forces, an Islamist rebel group in northeastern DR Congo that has been described as one of the greatest security threats in central Africa. The ADF have launched attacks on UN peacekeepers and civilians alike, and their constant attacks on aid workers have hampered recent efforts to contain outbreaks of the Ebola virus, leading to thousands of deaths and enabling the disease to spread like wildfire.
The ramifications of Rwanda did not end in July, 1994. They are still ongoing today, products of hatred, fear, racism, and an unwillingness to stop the worst mass genocide in recent history.
Justice
In November of 1994, the International Criminal Court (ICC) formed the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, a tribunal that aimed to charge the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide in international court with war crimes, genocide, mass murder, and crimes against humanity.
Arrest warrants were issued by both the ICTR and Rwandan government, seeking information on the Hutu extremists who had masterminded the genocide. More than 100,000 people were arrested in connection with the mass killings, many of them suspected Interahamwe members.
Froduald Karamira, the MDR's vice president who gave daily speeches urging Hutus to kill their Tutsi neighbors, was one of the first major genocidaires to be apprehended. In 1996, after two years on the run, Karamira was arrested in Mumbai, India, and deported to Ethiopia, where he had previously taken refuge.
After an extradition standoff between the ICTR and Rwandan government, the Ethiopian government sent Karamira to Kigali to stand trial in a Rwandan court for murder, genocide, and crimes against humanity.
Karamira's trial began in Kigali on January 14th, 1997. Though Karamira maintained his innocence - asserting that the genocide had "never occurred" and that he was being framed for political reasons - prosecutors accused Karamira of not only orchestrating the genocide, but even personally participating in the killings of Tutsis. Among the evidence against Karamira were recordings of his speeches, eyewitness accounts by genocide survivors, and testimony from some of Karamira's accomplices, who told of Karamira personally killing at least 13 members of his Tutsi family.
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| Froduald Karamira (left, in pink suit) talks with his attorney during his 1997 trial |
On February 14th, 1997, Karamira was found guilty on all charges, including murder, genocide, conspiracy, and failure to render assistance to people in danger. The court sentenced him to death by firing squad - the mandatory punishment at the time for genocide.
Karamira remained remorseless to the end. After the verdict was read, he smiled and left the courtroom whistling a tune.
On April 24th, 1998, Karamira and three other Hutu extremists convicted of genocide were brought into Nyamirambo Stadium in Kigali, which had once sheltered thousands of Tutsi refugees from the Interahamwe. Today, many of those same Tutsis were back to witness the deaths of those who had orchestrated the killings of their families. The stadium was packed with thousands of people, eager to see justice be done.
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| Froduald Karamira and other inmates convicted of genocide are led into Nyamirambo Stadium to be publicly executed for their crimes, April 24th, 1998. |
Karamira, clothed in a bright pink prison suit, was dragged, silently grinning, to the middle of the stadium, where he and three of his fellow convicts were each tied to their own posts. A black hood was pulled over each convict's head and a white target was pinned over their chests. On a given signal, a squad of masked policemen entered the stadium, aimed assault rifles at the bound convicts, and fired several shots into their hearts, killing them instantly.
Once the riflemen finished, a Rwandan military officer fired a shot into each convict's head with his service pistol to ensure their deaths. After the executions concluded, the stadium erupted with cheers and applause.
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| Tied to these posts in Nyamirambo Stadium, Froduald Karamira and three of his fellow genocidaires were publicly executed by firing squad in front of thousands of celebrating witnesses. 18 other convicted genocidaires would be executed across Rwanda that same day. It would be the last time the government of Rwanda would carry out judicial executions. |
This would be the last time that Rwanda would carry out executions. In 2007 - in part because several countries refused to extradite genocide suspects to countries that used capital punishment - the Rwandan government unanimously voted to abolish the death penalty and commuted the death sentences of all 800+ death row inmates in the country to life in prison without parole.
Most of the other masterminds of the genocide were soon rounded up and stood trial in international court for their crimes. The majority of them were convicted and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 15 years to life, though several still remain at large.
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| The major organizers of the Rwandan genocide and the sentences they received for their crimes. Froduald Karamira was executed by firing squad in 1998, and Georges Rutaganda, Robert Kajuga, and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza have all died in prison. |
Prime Minister Jean Kambanda pleaded guilty to all charges, although he tried to put most of the blame on the Rwandan military rather than himself. Kambanda was sentenced to life in prison and is currently held in the ICC's detention facility at Koulikoro Prison in Mali. To this day, Kambanda continues to maintain his innocence, claiming he was "tricked" into pleading guilty, and has repeatedly insisted that the horrific genocide he orchestrated never occurred.
Theoneste Bagosora, the Rwandan army officer who had been instrumental in planning and carrying out the genocide against the Tutsis, was convicted in 2007 of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison. In 2011, his sentence was commuted to 35 years, but he will not be eligible for release until 2030, when he will be 89 years old. Like Kambanda, Bagosora is also currently incarcerated in Koulikoro Prison.
The only major mastermind of the genocide who never made it to trial was President Theodore Sindikubwabo. He spent the rest of his life in exile in Zaire, and died there in 1998. He was never indicted by the ICTR for war crimes or crimes against humanity.
In the 25 years since the genocide, Rwanda has done its best to heal the deep wounds of division it had suffered.
Following the rebel victory, a new national constitution was authored and a new government was installed in Kigali. The RPF morphed from a revolutionary militia into a political party, and, in 2000, Paul Kagame was elected President of Rwanda by a huge margin, a position he still holds today.
The far-right MRND and CDR parties were banned, and laws were instituted banning the kind of hate speech that had led to the genocide.
Kagame promised to once again unite the country and heal the wounds of division between the Tutsis and Hutus. Together, he promised, Rwanda would heal from the horrors of the genocide and work towards a better, brighter future.
But even that would take time. For six years following the Rwandan Civil War, Hutu extremists continued to plague central Africa. Ex-Interahamwe militants formed groups such as the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda, and launched armed attacks on the Rwandan government and Tutsi villages. The extreme anti-Tutsi hatred fomented during the genocide simply refused to die.
Today, Rwanda's government no longer officially distinguishes ethnic groups, and the census no longer records the ethnicity of citizens. Instead of Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa, they are listed only as "Rwandan".
In 2001, the Rwandan government decided to change its national flag. Originally, it had been a French-style tricolor flag with pan-African colors and a big black "R" in the middle.
But the flag, which had been flown by the Interahamwe and the Rwandan Army during the genocide, now served only to remind Rwandans of the death squads, the killings, and the hatred that had torn the country apart.
Much like the Nazi swastika, the Rwandan "R-flag" has been condemned to history as a symbol of hatred, intolerance, and genocide. Its replacement is a blue, yellow, and green flag with a golden sun in the corner, which many thought better represented the country's majestic landscapes, environment, and culture.
It has been 25 years since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and, in those 25 years, the world has taken steps to prevent such atrocities from ever taking place again. The UN has since updated its combat rules, allowing UN Peacekeepers to use military force any time they believe themselves or others to be in immediate danger.
The UN has also adopted new protocols mandating intervention in cases of genocide, although, like before, they are not obligated to intervene unless a resolution is passed specifically declaring an incident a genocide.
But maybe the biggest lesson we should learn from Rwanda is this: Non-interventionism is a very, VERY dangerous policy. The idea that the United States should never be militarily involved in another country, even when said country is perpetrating the worst crimes against humanity imaginable, is inherently and fundamentally immoral, impractical, and contrary to the very values we Americans hold dear.
After the horrors of the Holocaust, the world made a simple vow: Never Again. Never again should people be persecuted for what God they worship, what color they are, and what ethnic group they belong to. Never again should innocent civilians be slaughtered for being different. Never again should these atrocities be allowed to happen. We promised ourselves - and the world - to always remember and never, ever forget.
But we broke that promise in 1994. We betrayed our oath and abandoned those who needed our help most. And we justified our inaction by telling ourselves that it wasn't our problem. Rwanda's problems were Rwanda's business, and no one else's.
Non-interventionists in the US government refused to endorse any military action to stop the horrors unfolding in Rwanda. They explained that they were not the world's police, and that it wasn't their job to stop the killings of Tutsis.
It wasn't like the US didn't know what was going on. Within three days of the genocide starting, hundreds of US Marines were sent into Rwanda to evacuate foreign citizens. The US government issued statements condemning the atrocities in Rwanda throughout the genocide, but condemnation was as far as they were willing to go.
America has long considered itself the world's bastion of freedom, democracy, and equality, and we have long sought to spread these values to the rest of the world. But we didn't do that in Rwanda. We turned and fled when confronted with evil. We turned away when the Tutsis cried out for help. We ignored the atrocities, the massacres, and the crimes against humanity that Rwanda was enduring.
When we were faced with evil, instead of standing up to it we turned away and did nothing.
And, in the end, the ramifications of our non-interventionism were catastrophic. 1.1 million innocent people were slaughtered. An entire ethnic group was nearly eradicated from the face of the earth. An entire region was plagued with an HIV epidemic that continues to kill thousands today. And we set a precedent, a very dangerous precedent, that, if oppressed people are targeted for genocide, we will simply stand by and do nothing to help them.
And we are making the same mistakes again today in places like Syria and Myanmar.
In Syria, when Bashar al-Assad committed acts of atrocities against his own civilians, gassing innocent children and cluster-bombing civilians, we stood by and did nothing. And even when we finally did do something, we drew the wrath of the non-interventionist crowd on both the right and left wing.
When Barack Obama launched an intervention in Syria to combat the rise of ISIL, progressives and non-interventionists screamed that Obama was a "neoliberal warhawk" who was launching an "illegal, offensive war" with the goal of "regime change".
When Donald Trump conducted airstrikes on Syrian airbases following nerve gas attacks on Syrian civilians, non-interventionists once again furiously screamed that "warhawks" from the "military-industrial complex" were, in the words of Kyle Kulinski, "offensively invading a country that didn't attack us".
And when Donald Trump announced that the US would be pulling out of Syria, non-interventionists applauded the move, ignoring the fact that doing so would leave the Kurds, an ethnic minority in Syria, totally vulnerable to the Syrian government. The Kurds had long resented Assad for persecution at his hands, and had been among the original rebels who rose up against the Syrian regime.
Assad and the Kurds declared a truce when the threat of ISIL emerged, but, with ISIL dwindling away, it is very likely that Bashar al-Assad will once again turn on the Kurds who, without our protection, could be subject to wholescale slaughter at the hands of his government. This was exactly what happened in the 1990s in Iraq, when Saddam Hussein turned his wrath on the Kurds and massacred them by the hundreds of thousands.
The similarities between the situations in Rwanda and Syria are uncanny. Think about it: An ethnic group oppressed by a totalitarian government has risen up against said regime and, although the two respective sides are currently under a ceasefire, there is an underlying resentment within the government against the ethnic minority, which is tactically outnumbered and outmatched and is on the verge of being abandoned by the rest of the world.
And, like what happened in Rwanda, liberal non-interventionists are eager for the US to pull out of Syria and leave it to its own business. They are making the exact same mistakes that led to the wholescale slaughter of 1.1 million civilians in Rwanda. They haven't learned a single thing.
And the worst thing is that these non-interventionists, even though they proudly claim to be progressives, aren't even true liberals! Liberals are supposed to stand up for oppressed people! They're supposed to advocate action to secure the fundamental human rights of all people across the world! They're supposed to extend a hand to help those in need of it, not turn away and diffuse responsibility onto someone else!
Non-interventionism is completely contrary to those liberal values. It disregards the human rights of others in favor of selfishness. And that is really what non-interventionism is: selfishness and laziness.
Now, of course, nobody in their right mind wants war. War is something that should be avoided when possible. But the idea that war should be avoided at all costs is absolutely ridiculous. There are times when military action is the only way to stop an unfolding atrocity, and there comes a time when inaction becomes indistinguishable from compliance.
In Rwanda, our inaction was tantamount to outright complicity in the genocide, and the non-interventionists who refused to allow action all have the blood of 1.1 million Tutsis on their hands. Let's not make the same mistake in Syria. Let's not abandon the Kurds the way we abandoned the Tutsis. Let's once again stay true to our oath to never, ever allow such evil crimes against humanity to ever happen again.
Now, I know that I will probably piss off a lot of progressive non-interventionists with this article. I know it is likely that I will be called a "warhawk", "warmonger", "neoliberal", and an advocate for "regime change" and "illegal offensive wars" by the same non-interventionists who allowed Rwanda to suffer.
But, if wanting to stop the atrocities seen in Rwanda from ever happening again somehow makes me a "warhawk", then I have but one thing to say to these non-interventionists:
Theoneste Bagosora, the Rwandan army officer who had been instrumental in planning and carrying out the genocide against the Tutsis, was convicted in 2007 of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison. In 2011, his sentence was commuted to 35 years, but he will not be eligible for release until 2030, when he will be 89 years old. Like Kambanda, Bagosora is also currently incarcerated in Koulikoro Prison.
The only major mastermind of the genocide who never made it to trial was President Theodore Sindikubwabo. He spent the rest of his life in exile in Zaire, and died there in 1998. He was never indicted by the ICTR for war crimes or crimes against humanity.
Healing the Scars
In the 25 years since the genocide, Rwanda has done its best to heal the deep wounds of division it had suffered.
Following the rebel victory, a new national constitution was authored and a new government was installed in Kigali. The RPF morphed from a revolutionary militia into a political party, and, in 2000, Paul Kagame was elected President of Rwanda by a huge margin, a position he still holds today.
The far-right MRND and CDR parties were banned, and laws were instituted banning the kind of hate speech that had led to the genocide.
Kagame promised to once again unite the country and heal the wounds of division between the Tutsis and Hutus. Together, he promised, Rwanda would heal from the horrors of the genocide and work towards a better, brighter future.
But even that would take time. For six years following the Rwandan Civil War, Hutu extremists continued to plague central Africa. Ex-Interahamwe militants formed groups such as the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda, and launched armed attacks on the Rwandan government and Tutsi villages. The extreme anti-Tutsi hatred fomented during the genocide simply refused to die.
Today, Rwanda's government no longer officially distinguishes ethnic groups, and the census no longer records the ethnicity of citizens. Instead of Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa, they are listed only as "Rwandan".
In 2001, the Rwandan government decided to change its national flag. Originally, it had been a French-style tricolor flag with pan-African colors and a big black "R" in the middle.
But the flag, which had been flown by the Interahamwe and the Rwandan Army during the genocide, now served only to remind Rwandans of the death squads, the killings, and the hatred that had torn the country apart.
 |
| The flag of Rwanda became synonymous with the 1994 genocide, and was replaced in 2001 |
Much like the Nazi swastika, the Rwandan "R-flag" has been condemned to history as a symbol of hatred, intolerance, and genocide. Its replacement is a blue, yellow, and green flag with a golden sun in the corner, which many thought better represented the country's majestic landscapes, environment, and culture.
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| The current flag of Rwanda, adopted in 2001. |
When Inaction Becomes Compliance: Rwanda and the Immorality of Non-Interventionism
It has been 25 years since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and, in those 25 years, the world has taken steps to prevent such atrocities from ever taking place again. The UN has since updated its combat rules, allowing UN Peacekeepers to use military force any time they believe themselves or others to be in immediate danger.
The UN has also adopted new protocols mandating intervention in cases of genocide, although, like before, they are not obligated to intervene unless a resolution is passed specifically declaring an incident a genocide.
But maybe the biggest lesson we should learn from Rwanda is this: Non-interventionism is a very, VERY dangerous policy. The idea that the United States should never be militarily involved in another country, even when said country is perpetrating the worst crimes against humanity imaginable, is inherently and fundamentally immoral, impractical, and contrary to the very values we Americans hold dear.
After the horrors of the Holocaust, the world made a simple vow: Never Again. Never again should people be persecuted for what God they worship, what color they are, and what ethnic group they belong to. Never again should innocent civilians be slaughtered for being different. Never again should these atrocities be allowed to happen. We promised ourselves - and the world - to always remember and never, ever forget.
But we broke that promise in 1994. We betrayed our oath and abandoned those who needed our help most. And we justified our inaction by telling ourselves that it wasn't our problem. Rwanda's problems were Rwanda's business, and no one else's.
Non-interventionists in the US government refused to endorse any military action to stop the horrors unfolding in Rwanda. They explained that they were not the world's police, and that it wasn't their job to stop the killings of Tutsis.
It wasn't like the US didn't know what was going on. Within three days of the genocide starting, hundreds of US Marines were sent into Rwanda to evacuate foreign citizens. The US government issued statements condemning the atrocities in Rwanda throughout the genocide, but condemnation was as far as they were willing to go.
America has long considered itself the world's bastion of freedom, democracy, and equality, and we have long sought to spread these values to the rest of the world. But we didn't do that in Rwanda. We turned and fled when confronted with evil. We turned away when the Tutsis cried out for help. We ignored the atrocities, the massacres, and the crimes against humanity that Rwanda was enduring.
When we were faced with evil, instead of standing up to it we turned away and did nothing.
And, in the end, the ramifications of our non-interventionism were catastrophic. 1.1 million innocent people were slaughtered. An entire ethnic group was nearly eradicated from the face of the earth. An entire region was plagued with an HIV epidemic that continues to kill thousands today. And we set a precedent, a very dangerous precedent, that, if oppressed people are targeted for genocide, we will simply stand by and do nothing to help them.
And we are making the same mistakes again today in places like Syria and Myanmar.
In Syria, when Bashar al-Assad committed acts of atrocities against his own civilians, gassing innocent children and cluster-bombing civilians, we stood by and did nothing. And even when we finally did do something, we drew the wrath of the non-interventionist crowd on both the right and left wing.
When Barack Obama launched an intervention in Syria to combat the rise of ISIL, progressives and non-interventionists screamed that Obama was a "neoliberal warhawk" who was launching an "illegal, offensive war" with the goal of "regime change".
When Donald Trump conducted airstrikes on Syrian airbases following nerve gas attacks on Syrian civilians, non-interventionists once again furiously screamed that "warhawks" from the "military-industrial complex" were, in the words of Kyle Kulinski, "offensively invading a country that didn't attack us".
And when Donald Trump announced that the US would be pulling out of Syria, non-interventionists applauded the move, ignoring the fact that doing so would leave the Kurds, an ethnic minority in Syria, totally vulnerable to the Syrian government. The Kurds had long resented Assad for persecution at his hands, and had been among the original rebels who rose up against the Syrian regime.
Assad and the Kurds declared a truce when the threat of ISIL emerged, but, with ISIL dwindling away, it is very likely that Bashar al-Assad will once again turn on the Kurds who, without our protection, could be subject to wholescale slaughter at the hands of his government. This was exactly what happened in the 1990s in Iraq, when Saddam Hussein turned his wrath on the Kurds and massacred them by the hundreds of thousands.
The similarities between the situations in Rwanda and Syria are uncanny. Think about it: An ethnic group oppressed by a totalitarian government has risen up against said regime and, although the two respective sides are currently under a ceasefire, there is an underlying resentment within the government against the ethnic minority, which is tactically outnumbered and outmatched and is on the verge of being abandoned by the rest of the world.
And, like what happened in Rwanda, liberal non-interventionists are eager for the US to pull out of Syria and leave it to its own business. They are making the exact same mistakes that led to the wholescale slaughter of 1.1 million civilians in Rwanda. They haven't learned a single thing.
In fact, some American non-interventionists, such as famed author and economist Edward Herman, have not only tried to downplay the scale of the genocide but have even outright denied that the genocide even happened! The lengths to which some of these non-interventionists will go to justify their inaction in Rwanda is truly staggering!
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| An anti-war activist protests Paul Kagame's state visit to Harvard University in 2016, holding a revisionist and borderline-denialist sign. Revisionism - if not outright denial - of the Rwandan genocide is a common theme among the anti-war and non-interventionist movement in the West. Many of these revisionists attempt to portray Kagame and the RPF as the "true" genocidaires of 1994 while minimizing the responsibility of the extremist Hutu-led government. |
And the worst thing is that these non-interventionists, even though they proudly claim to be progressives, aren't even true liberals! Liberals are supposed to stand up for oppressed people! They're supposed to advocate action to secure the fundamental human rights of all people across the world! They're supposed to extend a hand to help those in need of it, not turn away and diffuse responsibility onto someone else!
Non-interventionism is completely contrary to those liberal values. It disregards the human rights of others in favor of selfishness. And that is really what non-interventionism is: selfishness and laziness.
Now, of course, nobody in their right mind wants war. War is something that should be avoided when possible. But the idea that war should be avoided at all costs is absolutely ridiculous. There are times when military action is the only way to stop an unfolding atrocity, and there comes a time when inaction becomes indistinguishable from compliance.
In Rwanda, our inaction was tantamount to outright complicity in the genocide, and the non-interventionists who refused to allow action all have the blood of 1.1 million Tutsis on their hands. Let's not make the same mistake in Syria. Let's not abandon the Kurds the way we abandoned the Tutsis. Let's once again stay true to our oath to never, ever allow such evil crimes against humanity to ever happen again.
Now, I know that I will probably piss off a lot of progressive non-interventionists with this article. I know it is likely that I will be called a "warhawk", "warmonger", "neoliberal", and an advocate for "regime change" and "illegal offensive wars" by the same non-interventionists who allowed Rwanda to suffer.
But, if wanting to stop the atrocities seen in Rwanda from ever happening again somehow makes me a "warhawk", then I have but one thing to say to these non-interventionists:
Better to be a warhawk than a chickenshit.
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