Rwandan Genocide 1994 By Caleb Lacy Ms. Fruge’s 5 th period class

Hutu’s vs Tutsi’s When Belgium took over Rwanda the split the “natives” into two groups. The first were the Tutsi’s which were noticeably lighter skinned, and they made roughly 20% of the population. The rest of the population were labeled the Hutu’s and had darker skin. In all reality the two “races” were exactly the same. The Belgians however decided that the Hutu’s had better leadership qualities, so they promoted them over the Hutu’s. This is what would start the genocide years later.

The Physical Beginning After many years of Hutu’s feeling discriminated against there came a breaking point. There was a group of Hutu’s, mainly militias, that attempted to kill all Tutsi’s starting on April 6, 1994 when a plane carrying President Habyarimana was shot down. After the armed forces sought out every Tutsi and tried to kill them(the Hutu’s were mainly armed with machetes and non- projectile objects).

Similarities with the Holocaust Both genocides had to do with a group of people that were blamed for all of another groups problem, though in reality they were innocent. The reality of the second group was to wipe out the first group that supposedly caused the second groups problems. Another similarity is that there were brave people that hid those being prosecuted. An example of this is Paul Rusesabagina, who sheltered both Hutu’s and Tutsi’s from the ongoing genocide.

Length The Rwandan genocide lasted one-hundred days, and it isn’t very long compared to the holocaust, caused death of around 1 million people(according to the U.N.’s website), and even more Tutsi’s were exiled to surrounding countries.

Intervention To help stop the genocide, the U.N. sent soldiers on a humanitarian mission into Rwanda to stop the Hutu’s that were killing the Tutsi’s. Unfortunately that wasn’t until June 22, and the genocide started on April 6.

Prevention Hundreds of thousands of deaths could have been spared if someone had intervened in April instead of several months later in June. We could stop this from happening in other countries just by looking for rising tensions. Also even if we cant stop a genocide from starting, we can intervene at the beginning of the genocide to save as many lives as possible.

Citations “Rwanda: A Brief History of the Country.”United Nations. UN Web Services Section. nd. Web. 01 June “Genocide in Rwanda”. United Human Rights. VIBSCO. nd. Web. 01 June “Rwanda: How the Genocide Happened”. BBC. British Broadcasting Channel. 18 December Web. 01 June 2013