This document outlines a 6-day lesson plan on teaching about the Rwandan genocide. Day 2 provides background on the origins of the genocide, including how Belgian colonialism exacerbated tensions between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups by privileging Tutsis. It discusses the plane crash that killed Rwanda's president in 1994, fueling revenge killings. Day 4 discusses the limited response of the UN despite its purpose to prevent threats to international peace. Statistics are provided on the approximate 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus killed by Hutu militias over 100 days. The aftermath involved Hutu refugees and attempts at reconciliation are discussed for Days 5 and 6.

1. Analytical Reasoning:
Genocide in Rwanda
Dr. Helen Chukwuma
Dr. Sakinah Abdur-Rashied
Dr. Shakira Cain

2. Genocide in Rwanda

4. Is This Right?

5. Objectives:
 Students will have a clear
understanding of genocide.
 Students will be able to recognize the
origins and causes of genocide.
 Analyze the implication of genocide
globally.
 To understand the intervention and role
of the United Nations in genocide.
 To appreciate lessons learned from
genocide in terms of human dignity, the
rule of law, and tolerance

6. Day 1
 Class Activity: Pretest, Definition and
discussion of genocide.
 Why genocide originated: Colonialism,
Nativism, Ethnic cleansing, Religious
intolerance, Racism, and Economics
 Examples of historical origins of
genocide: Nazi, Biafra, Sudan, Liberia,
and Rwanda.
 Assignment: research genocide in
Rwanda

7. Pretest
 What is genocide?
 Where can it occur?
 Who does it involve?
 Name a people who has suffered
genocide.

8. Day 2
 Origins of genocide in Rwanda: How
did it begin?

9. Day 2
 Analytical Reasoning: The Rwanda Genocide. 1994.
 Preamble.
 Day 2. The Origins of Rwanda Genocide.
 Rwanda is a land-locked country in Central
Africa with a population of 7.3 million.(Show Map.) Their
language is Rwanda but they also speak English,
French and Swahili. They were colonized by Belgium
before they gained their independence in 1962.There
are three ethnic groups in Rwanda:
 a) The Hutus who are approximately 85% of the
population
 b) The Tutsis who are approximately 14% of the
population
 c) The Twa who are approximately 1% of the
population.

10. Continued
 The conflict of citizenship and indigeneity
was really between the Hutus and the
Tutsis.
 Causes of Genocide:Colonialism by
Belgium
 Racism and Indigeneity
 Privileged Citizenship
 The Plane Crash that killed President
Habyarimana
 Search for Justice as an Act of Revenge,
Retribution and Ethnic Cleansing.

11. Continued
 Colonialism:
 Class test (Take Home) a) What is
Colonialism? Identify three countries
that were former colonies in the
continents of Africa, Asia and the
Americas.
 b)Who are the Hutus and the Tutsis?

12. Continued
 Colonialism severed the socio-cultural links that
bound the Rwandan people as an entity. The
Belgian political rulers in a bid to maintain a
power strong-hold on the country, introduced a
deep racial divide between the Hutus and the
Tutsis. They identified the Hutus as of the Bantu
race and ancestry and so were indigenes and
owners of the land while the Tutsis were a
Hamitic race who migrated from Ethiopia so were
aliens. The colonialists using racial difference
favored the Tutsis who were thus associated with
privilege and power. Colonial divisiveness was
thus the initial cause of conflict and rivalry
between two hitherto ethnicities who co-habited
before the advent of the colonialists.

13. Continued
 Racism and Indigeneity:
 The country in the Belgian Reform of the
thirties had three levels of population: the
natives/indigenes or the Hutus, the aliens or
the Tutsis and the settlers or the Belgian
colonists. Such a divide led to civil strife so
that when the Belgians left, issues of race
and indigeneity rendered governance difficult.
There were massacres but not genocide.
Some Tutsis fled to Uganda a neighboring
country and there formed the RPF Rwanda
Patriotic Front led by Mr.Kagame and
continued the struggle for a full and
participatory citizenship.

14. Continued
 Privileged Citizenship:
 The privileged citizenship of the Hutu
over the Tutsi helped to ignite the
Revolution of 1959 whose aftermath
caused dis-affection and unrest in
the polity.
 The Plane Crash that killed the Hutu
President Habiyarimana:

15. Continued
 On April 6th1994, the plane carrying
President Habiyarimana and other
dignitaries was shot down. The crash
was blamed on the Tutsi leader
Mr.Kagame then in exile in Uganda.
Mr. Kegame denied the charge. The
Hutu population still held Kegame and
the Tutsis accountable.
 Search for Justice as an Act of
Revenge, Retribution and Ethnic
Cleansing:

16. Continued
 Class Discussion:
 Do you consider the genocidal
impulse an admissible form of settling
political disputes? In other
words,Discuss whether the quest for
power and control justifies genocide
and man’s inhumanity to man. Give
reasons for your answer.
 .

17. Day 3
 Movie: Hotel Rwanda
 Class Activities: Discussion

18. Day 4
 Intervention of the United Nations
 What is the UN, it’s purpose, what did
it do, and what could it have done
during the Rwandan genocide?
 Student Activity - Three panels will
be formed to brainstorm possible
actions that could have been taken by
the United Nations

19. continued
What is the UN, and what is its purpose.
 The United Nations is an international organization
founded in 1945 by 51 countries. The Organization
can take action on a wide range of issues, and
provides a forum for its 192 Member States to express
their views, through the General Assembly, the
Security Council, the Economic and Social Council
and other bodies and committees.
 The purpose of the UN is to maintain international
peace and security, to take effective collective
measures for the prevention and removal of threats to
peace.
 To achieve international co-operation in solving
international problems of an economic, social, cultural,
or humanitarian nature.

20. Continued
 In March of 1998, President Clinton issued the "Clinton
apology." "We come here today partly in recognition of
the fact that we in the United States and the world
community did not do as much as we could have and
should have done to try to limit what occurred" in
Rwanda.
 This implied that the United States had done a good
deal but not quite enough. In reality the United States
did much more than fail to send troops. It led a
successful effort to remove most of the UN
peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda. It
aggressively worked to block the subsequent
authorization of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its
technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial
instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the
genocide.

21. Continued
 Three of the five permanent members of the UN
had reasons not to prevent the genocide. The
US had nothing to gain, and France and China
were supplying the government with arms.
Most other countries had no investments or
anything to gain from helping Rwanda, so little
was done.
 And even as, an average, 8,000 Rwandans were
being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned
the term "genocide," for fear of being obliged to
act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing
to "try to limit what occurred." Indeed, staying out
of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective.

22. Day 5
 Rwanda and Genocide: What are the
statistics, and the cultural
implications?

23. Rwandan Genocide
Who was murdered?
Who were the murders?

24. During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda,
ID cards were death warrants for
many Tutsis.
—Jerry Fowler/USHMM

25. Continued
 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.

26. 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.

27. 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.

28. 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.”

29. 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.”

30. 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.

31. Day 6
 Truth and reconciliation as a global paradigm
for post-genocide RwandaTruth and
Reconciliation Committee.
 Truth and Reconciliation Committee.( Please
see what I wrote in Day 6) This is a
continuation.
 In July,1994, the RPF captured Kigali the
capital of Rwanda and the Tutsis took over
government. Two million Hutus fled to the
Republic of the Congo for fear of retaliation.
The threat of war and reprisals haunted both
the Tutsi-led government and the fugitive
Hutu. How can lasting peace be achieved?

32. Day 6
Truth and Reconciilation in Post Genocide
Rwanda
 Nations after a disjointed governance
marked by genocide, apartheid and
massacres would institute a Truth and
Reconciliation Committee to heal
wounds and return the nation to order
and normalcy.
 An example is the TRC of South Africa
after the end of the Apartheid regime and
the freedom of Nelson Mandela.

33. Continued
 Test: Research into and name three
other nations that had the TRC (Truth
Reconciliation Committee).
 With genocide, there are victims and
victimizers. The distinctions are not
clearly made but the glaring point is
that the Hutu are “the guilty majority
and the Tutsi are the fearful minority.”

34. Peace cannot be achieved
without truth and justice.
 Issues of Truth and Reconciliation
Committee in post-genocidal Rwanda.
 a) The truth in Rwanda genocide is
known, there is no need for confession
as was the case in South Africa. In
Rwanda, genocide was public and open.
Any living Hutu is presumed guilty of
killing because if you did not kill, you
were killed by your own.
 b) What does justice and reconciliation
mean to Hutus and Tutsis?

35. Peace cannot be achieved
without truth and justice.
 c) The Hutus are the political majority and the
Tutsis the political minority. While the minority
calls for justice, the majority calls for democracy.
 d) How can the minority be safeguarded from a
genocidal reoccurrence?
 e) How can the Hutus no more be marginalized
economically?
 f) Should Justice be retributive, that is punitive
(punish the evil-doers) or should it be
reconciliatory? What is the more realistic and
tenable option?
 g) Should the genocide survivors be compensated
and rehabilitated? How about the Hutu refugees
who fled to Congo Republic, will they also be
rehabilitated?


36. Some Suggestions:
 a) For a lasting peace and to remove danger to
the Tutsis, they should be given a separate state
of their own.
 b) There should be a re-organization of power
between the citizens not on cultural lines but as
political entities.
 c) Rwandan citizenship should be reconciled.
 d) Their history must be written so that the lessons
of the past will be available to the younger
generation.

37. Suggestions Continued
 Should there be international
intervention or should Rwanda work
on its own solution?

38. Rwanda: Lessons Learned
 Stop the genocide before it becomes
a genocide.
 React promptly and firmly to
preparations for the mass slaughter
of civilians.
 Pay close attention to the media in
situations of potential ethnic,
religious, or racial conflict. In cases of
impending genocide, be prepared to
silence broadcasts that incite or
provide directions for violence.

39. Continued
 Be alert to the impact of negative models
in nearby regions.
 Obtain accurate information about what is
happening on the ground.
 Identify and support opponents of the
genocide.
 Call the genocide by its rightful name and
vigorously condemn it. Commit to
permanently opposing any government
involved in genocide, including by
refusing it assistance in the future.

40. Continued
 Impose an arms embargo on the
genocidal government.
 Press any government seeming to
support the genocidal government
to change its policy.
 Be prepared to intervene with
armed force.

41. Day 7
 A Re-enactment of the Rwandan
genocide
 Class divides into two groups: A)Hutu
B)Tutsi
 Reconcilers, Panel of judges
 Class Activity: To be filmed

42. Day 8
 Assignment: written exercise: what
were, in your opinion, lessons learned
from Rwandan genocide?
 How can genocide situations be
avoided in the future?

43. Day 8 Continued:
 Post Test
 What is genocide?
 Where can it occur?
 Who does it involve?
 Name a people who has suffered
genocide

44. 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.

45. 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/sup
port_hope.htm. Retrieved 2008-10-02

46. References continued
 Carroll, Rory, US Chose to Ignore
Rwandan Genocide, Johannesburg The
Guardian,
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/mar/31/
usa.rwanda
 www.un.org
 www.nsarchive.org
 Power, Samantha, Bystanders to
Genocide
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2
001/09/bystanders-to-genocide/4571/
 www.gwu.edu/~nsarchive/NSAEBB/inde
x.html

47. References Continued
 www.hrw.org/legacy/english/docs/200
4/03/29/rwanda8308.htm
 Mamdani, Mahmood, (2001). When
victims become killers- Colonialism,
Nativism, and the Genocide in
Rwanda, Princeton University Press,
Princeton, N.J.