A BACKGROUND OF RWANDA

Between April and July 1994, some 800,000 innocent Rwandans were slaughtered in a well-planned, systematic genocide. On April 6, the plane carrying the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down. Extremist members of the ruling majority Hutus then implemented an established plan to kill minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The Hutu extremists carried out the killing using the full resources of the government and militias known as the Interahamwe that they had previously organized and trained. Many ordinary citizens participated in the killing, some voluntarily, some under threat of death.

The genocide took place against a backdrop of escalating violence within the country. Periodic violence between the Hutu and Tutsi had occurred since independence, spurred on by ethnic divisions manipulated by the Belgian colonial rulers who had ruled Rwanda until 1962. Inter-ethnic violence and massacres escalated with the invasion of a Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) from neighboring Uganda in 1990. Unable to win on the battlefield and faced with a peace agreement that would give the minority Tutsi more power, hard-line Hutus developed and implemented plans to "exterminate the enemy" in April 1994.

The International Community and the Genocide
When the killing began, about 2,500 UN blue-helmets were in Rwanda under the command of Canadian General Romeo Dallaire. Reacting in large part to the recent deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers in Somalia, the United States led efforts at the Security Council to withdraw or reduce the Dallaire force, despite his pleas before and during the genocide for more troops. On April 21, the Security Council reduced the force to 270. Despite a later resolution authorizing an increase in UN troops and an ambiguous intervention in late June by the French (who had longstanding ties with the leaders of the genocide), no more blue helmets arrived before the effective end of the genocide on July 18 when the RPF declared the war over. 

After the Genocide
As the RPF fought their way through Rwanda, millions of Hutu refugees fled into neighboring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) for fear of reprisals. As a cholera epidemic wracked the massive refugee camps, international aid flowed in from the countries that had stood by during the genocide. The same Hutu militias that had carried out the genocide quickly asserted a level of control over the camps, enabling them to provision themselves and launch raids back into Rwanda. Ten years later, some of these militas are still operating in eastern Congo, contributing to the massive war in that region.

Since the genocide, there is near-unanimous agreement among experts, scholars, and military specialists that the genocide most likely could have been prevented or stopped by the international community. There were ample warning signs that a genocide was being planned, and even once the killing had started, a show of force by the international community to strengthen the UN peacekeeping force would have most likely been able to stop the killing. 

March 1, 2004