Massacres mostly occured in places people had fled to, hoping they would be safe
At many genocide sites the remains of the dead have been left as a memorial
The 1994 Genocide
The following account of the Genocide follows on from the previous history of Rwanda page and assumes some knowledge of that history.
On 6 April 1994 president Habyarimana of Rwanda was killed when his plane was attacked by surface to air missiles as it returned to Kigali from a conference. Also in the aircraft were the new president of Burundi and several key members of the Rwandan government and military. The source of the attack has never been confirmed - it was claimed by some of those who seized power to be the work of Belgian UN peacekeepers in collusion with the RPF. By the time most of the population were aware of what had happened, having been informed by radio the next morning, road blocks had been erected all over Rwanda. Army units, the police and militias started to work through their lists of Tutsis and moderate Hutus (including the Prime Minister, killed within hours of the President’s death).
Fearing for their lives, and often with their homes in flames, many people fled to places where UN troops were stationed, but the peacekeepers did not have the ammunition to even defend themselves and were mandated to observe only and not intervene. When ten Belgian soldiers were taken hostage and then murdered by Rwandan army soldiers the vast majority of the already small UN force was evacuated. Many other people fled to churches, often guided there by local officials and priests who then organised their murder. The interahamwe was responsible for a great deal of the killing but in some cases the local Hutu population was mobilised, equipped with machetes (the government having recently purchased a million of these from China with aid money) and sent to ‘clear the bush’ of Tutsi. Members of the militias had been trained to cut the achilles tendons of victims to prevent them from escaping, and often returned the next day to finish the killing. Women and children were killed without mercy, often by former friends, priests and teachers, and women were systematically raped.
As soon as the genocide began the RPF launched an attack from the north of the country. Without support from foreign troops and engaged as it was in mass-murder the Rwandan army was no match for the smaller rebel force. Members of the RPF are known to have committed atrocities but it was reported by a number of neutral observers to be an unusually disciplined and ordered army. Despite this massacres of Hutus did occur, particulary in the north of Rwanda where the RPF had been in control the longest. It does not appear that such killings ever amounted to a systematic attempt to eliminate the Hutu. However the Hutu officials responsible for the genocide told the Hutu population that the RPF was murdering all the Hutus it found as it advanced, and huge numbers of people, with the genocidaires as they came to be known hidden amongst them, fled before the advancing army.
The only troops to come to Rwanda’s aid during the genocide were French, but unfortunately their actions only served to extend the killing in the part of the country they secured and aid the escape of those responsible. The message from the Rwandan government (which had a seat on the UN security council at the time) was that the legitimate regime was losing a particularly bloody civil war, and that any killing of Tutsi civilians was the result of rioting by a population enraged at the atrocities of the RPF. French troops therefore came to the aid of the government, which promptly fled, mostly into Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The genocide ended when the RPF took control of the country, and those that carried it out fled as refugees, intermingled with genuine refugees who believed their propeganda. Between 800,000 and one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus had been killed in three months, a rate of killing which surpasses that during the Holocaust when the Nazi death camps were working at full capacity. A National Trauma survey by UNICEF in 1995 estimated the percentages of children affected as follows:
99.9% witnessed violence 79.6% experienced death in the family 69.5% witnessed someone being killed or injured 61.5% were threatened with death 90.6% believed they would die 57.7% witnessed killings or injuries with machete 31.4% witnessed rape or sexual assault 87.5% saw dead bodies or parts of bodies
