2. • The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass
murder of an estimated 800,000 people. Over the
course of approximately 100 days from the
assassination of Juvenal Habyarimana on April 6
through mid-July, at least 800,000 people were
killed, according to a Human Rights Watch
estimate. Other estimates of the death toll have
ranged between 500,000 and 1,000,000 (a
commonly quoted figure is 800,000) or as much
as 20% of the country's total population.
3. Who was murdered?
Who were the murders
• The assassination of Habyarimana in April 1994
was the proximate cause of the mass killings of
Tutsis and pro-peace Hutus. The mass killings
were carried out primarily by two Hutu militias
associated with political parties: the Interahamwe
and the Impuzamugambi. The genocide was
directed by a Hutu power group known as the
Akazu. The mass killing also marked the end of
the peace agreement meant to end the war, and
the Tutsi RPF restarted their offensive, eventually
defeating the army and seizing control of the
country.
4. The Murders
• Numerous elite Hutu politicians have been found
guilty for the organization of the genocide. The
Rwandan Military and Hutu militia groups,
notably the Interahamwe, systematically set out
to murder all the Tutsis they could capture,
irrespective of their age or sex, as well as the
political moderates. Hutu civilians were forced to
participate in the killings or be shot and were
instructed to kill their Tutsi neighbors. Most
nations evacuated their nationals from Kigali and
abandoned their embassies in the initial stages of
the violence.
5. Aftermath
Approximately two million Hutus, participants in
the genocide, and the bystanders, with
anticipation of Tutsi retaliation, fled from
Rwanda, to Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, and for
the most part Zaire. Thousands of them died in
epidemics of diseases common to the squalor of
refugee camps, such as cholera and dysentery.
The United States staged the Operation Support
Hope airlift from July to September 1994 to
stabilize the situation in the camps.
6. References:
• Des Forges, Alison (1999). Leave None to Tell the
Story: Genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch.
ISBN 1-56432-171-1.
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/rwanda.
Retrieved 2007-01-12.
• See, e.g., Rwanda: How the genocide happened,
BBC, April 1, 2004, which gives an estimate of
800,000, and OAU sets inquiry into Rwanda
genocide, Africa Recovery, Vol. 12 1#1 (August
1998), page 4, which estimates the number at
between 500,000 and 1,000,000. Seven out of
every 10 Tutsis were killed.
7. References continued:
• Transcript of remarks by Mark Doyle in Panel 3:
International media coverage of the Genocide of the
symposium Media and the Rwandan Genocide held at
Carleton University, March 13, 2004
• Ch. 10: "The Rwandan genocide and its aftermath"PDF
in State of the World's Refugees 2000, United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees
• "Operation Support Hope". GlobalSecurity.org. 2005-
04-27.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/support_h
ope.htm. Retrieved 2008-10-02
8. Women Killers and Child Accomplices
• By September 1995, several hundred of the
10,000 inmates in Kilgali’s central prison were
women. Rakiya Omar of the African rights
told an Associated Press journalist that some
“were actively involved, killing with machetes
and guns” while others “acted in support roles
allowing murder squads access to hospitals
and homes, cheering on male killers, stripping
the dead and looting their houses.”
9. Women Killers and Child Accomplices
• Women killed a few, but mainly waited for
Tutsi women crossing the river with a kid on
the back, so they would take the kid and
throw it in the water.
• Reference: McDowell, “342 Women
Implicated in Genocide.”
10. LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE THAT ARE
CRITICAL TO HUMAN DIGNITY, THE RULE OF LAW AND
TOLERANCE
• In 1998, UN Secretary General acknowledged the
UN failure:
• "... The world must deeply repent this failure.
Rwanda's tragedy was the world's tragedy. All of
us who cared about Rwanda, all of us who
witnessed its suffering, fervently wish that we
could have prevented the genocide. . . Now we
know that what we did was not nearly enough--
not enough to save Rwanda from itself, not
enough to honor the ideals for which the United
Nations exists."
11. LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE THAT ARE
CRITICAL TO HUMAN DIGNITY, THE RULE OF LAW AND
TOLERANCE
• Only with demonstrable and principled solidarity
with the people of Rwanda can we do some
justice to the Day of Reflection in April, and in the
process expand the frontiers of human rights
rather than undermine its practical ideals and
appeals.
• Dr. Amii Omara-Otunnu is the UNESCO Chair in
Human Rights and Professor of History, University of
Connecticut, USA
12. LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE THAT ARE
CRITICAL TO HUMAN DIGNITY, THE RULE OF LAW AND
TOLERANCE
• With the memory of the genocide in the background,
we should extend hands of solidarity and support to
the people of Rwanda who are doing their mighty
best to scale the odds to fashion a new dawn for the
reconciliation and renewal of society in which people
can find space to live in peace and harmony.
• Dr. Amii Omara-Otunnu is the UNESCO Chair in
Human Rights and Professor of History, University of
Connecticut, USA
13. LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE
THAT ARE CRITICAL TO HUMAN DIGNITY, THE RULE OF
LAW AND TOLERANCE
• We did not act quickly enough after the killing
began. We should not have allowed the
refugee camps to become safe haven for the
killers. We did not immediately call these
crimes by their rightful name: genocide." A
quote from President Bill Clinton.
14. Lessons learned regarding Rwanda from President Bill
Clinton, 42nd President of the United States
• I hope that the international community will
continue to learn from our mistakes in
Rwanda in 1994. We need to improve our
intelligence-gathering capabilities, increase
the speed with which international
intervention can be undertaken and muster
the global political will required to respond to
the threat of genocide wherever it may occur.
