Significance of the Rwandan Genocide

Alsina González
Specialist journalist and researcher

When we hear the word "genocide", Nazi concentration camps quickly come to mind, the most recent case in Bosnia during the wars of independence of the former Yugoslavia, or the one that is being committed against the population Rohingya in Burma. Maybe he armenian genocide for those who know more about history, but another one that was terrible and has been half forgotten is what happened in Rwanda in 1994.

The Rwandan genocide was a deliberate attempt to wipe out the Tutsi minority by supremacist elements of the Hutu majority that occurred in Rwanda in 1994.

However, the outbreak of violence was not something spontaneous and unprecedented, rather the hatred between these two ethnic groups had a remote origin, several centuries old.

Until the 11th century (according to the Western calendar), the current territory occupied by Rwanda was home to pygmies of the Twa ethnic group. It was then that they arrived, the result of a massive migration, the Hutus, who came to dominate the previous ones, decimating them.

This fact should not surprise us, since the history of humanity is full of massive migrations of peoples. whole, and current societies are the result of the mixture and substitutions caused by these migrations.

In the 14th century it was the Tutsis who arrived in the region. If the Hutus came from the north, from the Nile area, the Tutsis came from the east, and they conquered and dominated the population established in Rwanda.

As a result of these successive waves of migration and conquests, a stratified society was created, in which the Twa ethnic group regressed in in terms of territory occupied and number of members (until being a minority today), and also occupying the lowest echelon of the castes social.

At the top of the pyramid, the new Tutsi “masters”, with the Hutus in the middle. However, the differences between classes were not different from, for example, those established in the kingdoms created by the "barbarian" peoples who were occupying territories conquered to Roman empire, and in which the old Roman citizens occupied the lower stratum than the new “masters”.

The arrival of the Europeans in the 19th century will disrupt social relations in the country and, as in other parts of Africa, will cause a fracture and confrontation between ethnic groups and tribes.

The Europeans, outnumbered but technologically more advanced, needed to ally themselves with a few to attack others and sow dissension so that the natives would fight each other weakening. Only in this way, the conquerors could be victorious. And they were very cunning in the way they did it, Machiavellian in the worst sense of the term.

Initially it was the Germans who conquered Rwanda, but this colonial rule passed to Belgium after the First World War. The Belgians, like the Germans, also exploited clan differences, and they did it even better… better for themselves, of course, and much worse for the native Rwandans.

The Belgians favored the Tutsis to obtain power, applying the Machiavellian maxim of allying with the weakest to go against the strongest.

But the Hutu did not sit idly by, and responded with various revolts during the late 1950s and into the mid-1960s. Independence formally arrived in 1962, but society was fractured by so many years of misrepresentative foreign intervention. The damage was done, the hatred planted.

The Hutu eventually came to power, the Tutsi monarchy was abolished and a republic was established in the country. Meanwhile, the Tutsi began to leave the country, and inter-ethnic violence grew and turned into a civil war that would end in the mid-1970s.

In 1990, the Tutsi exiles were included in the Rwandan Patriotic Front to invade or liberate the country, depending on the perspective from which one looks at it.

The result of the contest is a "tie", to put it in some way, which forces the signing of a peace and the training of a shared government. However, this does not lead to effective inter-ethnic pacification.

Using the media, such as the radio, the Hutu supremacists began to spread slogans encouraging their ethnic group to carry out full-blown ethnic cleansing.

Paramilitary groups were created which, thanks to the fact that the majority of the Rwandan population is of Hutu, they were able to quickly build up a large number of affiliated members and begin to control the country.

In 1994 the situation got out of control, leading to an open “hunt” by elements of the Hutu supremacist sector against the Tutsis.

In just over three months, almost a million people were killed, a ratio of deaths to time that makes this the worst genocide in history.

The Tutsi would not sit idly by, so they fought back; the Rwandan Patriotic Front was reactivated, which managed to gain control of the country in about three months. With this, the exile of some two million Hutus also began.

Although I have explained before that there were close to a million victims in total, not all of them were due to the extermination of the Hutus against the Tutsis, but there were radicals on both sides, and in the context of the civil war, there were also deaths caused by purely military.

The civil war and genocide not only deepened the social fracture, but also caused a wave of refugees and the collapse of the economy.

Since 1994 and since peace, Rwanda has tried with some success to close and heal its wounds. The economy is prospering, making the country an interesting place to invest, and despite the division into a society continues to exist, very well-directed efforts have been and are still being made to shut it down.

Fotolia Arts: jiris, 1000pixels