Rwanda is a small, landlocked country in sub-Saharan Africa. In 1994 genocide took place in Rwanda. The genocide in Rwanda was a horrible conflict where the Tutsis were the victims. The Tutsis and their Hutu supporters were killed in mass killings. The only reason why they were killed was simply because they were Tutsi or because they were Hutus that didn’t want to kill Tutsis. This was entirely the Belgians fault. If the Belgians wouldn’t have given the Tutsis power in the beginning, this conflict never would’ve arisen.
In Rwanda there are two major ethnic groups, the Tutsis and the Hutus. In Rwanda, the Hutus are a majority while the Tutsis are a minority. Since 1916 there have been tensions between the two ethnic groups. In 1916 the Belgians classified all citizens by ethnicity. This was when all of the problems started and it was here that the tensions between ethnic groups started to tighten. Tutsis are usually taller and thinner than they’re Hutu neighbors. Because of this, the Tutsis were considered better than the Hutus by the Belgians. For 20 years the Tutsis had better jobs and better education. In the book History, Leave None to Tell the Story; Genocide in Rwanda, Human Rights, which was a book written in 1999, 5 years after the conflict, it says; “
Because Europeans thought that the Tutsi looked more like themselves than did other Rwandans, they found it reasonable to suppose them closer to Europeans in the evolutionary hierarchy and hence closer to them in ability. Believing the Tutsi to be more capable, they found it logical for the Tutsi to rule Hutu and Twa just as it was reasonable for Europeans to rule Africans. Unaware of the “Hutu” contribution to building Rwanda, the Europeans saw only that the ruler of this impressive state and many of his immediate entourage were Tutsi, which led them to assume that the complex institutions had been created exclusively by Tutsi.” This was written by Alison Des Forges and this book won the MacArthur Award (the "Genius Grant").
So it is pretty obvious that this was the fault of the Belgians. The Belgians tried to give one group special privileges without knowing anything about the situation in the little country. All they saw was more European looking people and not-European people. This shows that Belgium was a very ignorant imperialist country. (It mentions Twa in the quote above and that is just the earliest group of people to settle in Rwanda but they are impartial to the conflict that took place there.)
Later on, the Hutus started to rebel. In the 1950’s the Hutus conducted a series of riots that left 20,000 Tutsis dead. Finally in 1962, Rwanda was granted its independence. Once Rwanda was no longer a colony, the Hutus took powerful positions in society. While in power, the Hutus blamed everything they could on the Tutsis.
During this time of hatred, many of the Tutsis fled for refuge in neighboring countries. A lot of the Tutsis were hosted by moderate Hutus that did not hate their Tutsi neighbors. While in other countries, the Tutsis started the RPF, which stands for the Rwandan Patriotic Front. The purpose of this organization was to overthrow Habyarimana, who was the Hutu extremist president. Habyarimana just used this as leverage. He said they were trying to overthrow the Hutus to try to gain Hutu followers. Because of this, all Tutsis in Rwanda were accused of being members of the RPF. Finally in 1993 Habyarimana signed a peace accord with the Rwandan Patriotic Front but it didn’t stop any of the conflict between the two ethnic groups.
The start of the actual genocide was in 1994. Habyarimana’s plane was shot down. It is still unknown who shot down the president’s plane but, of course, the Hutus blamed it on the Tutsis because the Tutsis were the first people with motives the Hutus could think of. In Kigali, the people who guard the president, sort of like the secret service, created a group of people that wanted to seek revenge. Only hours after the president’s plane was shot down, there were tons of extremist Hutus that joined the group. The group kept growing because the presidential guard sent out a large amount of people who were meant to recruit other possible followers of the presidential guard. Other people that organized the group were military officials, politicians and businessmen. The name of the group was Interahamwe which can be translated to those who attack together. The Interahmawe gathered followers by recruiting and with propaganda over the radio. This got the Interahmawe 30,000 followers. Many of the followers joined because joining was incentivized. Participants were given money, food, and sometimes the land of the Tutsis they kill.
The killing went on for what seemed like forever until finally, in July, the RPF captured Kigali. The government collapsed and the RPF was in control. The first thing they did as the new government was declare a ceasefire. Once everyone knew that the Rwandan Patriotic front was in charge, an estimated two million Hutus fled to the Democratic Republic of Congo. They were all fearful that the Tutsis were going to take their revenge on the Hutus.
The first thing that was done about the situation in Rwanda was setting up a government that contained both Hutus and Tutsis. So there was Bizimungu, a Hutu, as president and Kagame, who was the leader of the RPF, as his deputy. That setup did not last because Bizimungu was later imprisoned on the charges of inciting ethnic violence. In the end Kagame just ended up becoming president. Even though the killing in Rwanda was over, there is still fighting going on because the Hutu militias in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The fact that the Hutus are there has led to years of conflict there, which caused around five million deaths. Rwanda's Tutsi-led government has invaded the Democratic Republic of Congo twice, saying it wants to wipe out the Hutu forces. And a Tutsi rebel group in the Congo remains active, refusing to cooperate peacefully, they say that they have to be violent or their community at risk of genocide. The UN has tried to keep peace but they can’t.
This is all happening because of the Belgians in 1916. If they would’ve simply left this tiny African country alone, this conflict would’ve been totally avoidable.
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