Genocide in Rwanda

For hundreds of years, the Tutsi and Hutu peoples had lived as one community in Rwanda. They share a common language and a common religion. Until the mid-1990s, intermarriage was common.

Differences persisted, though. Hutus are cultivators while Tutsis are herdsman. Tutsis tend to be richer, since livestock is more valuable than crops.

As a result of their wealth, Tutsis were the dominant political force in Rwanda. This created political conflict but, until 1959, this conflict had never been violent. Between 1959 and the 1990s, sporadic, sometimes severe, violence between Tutsi and Hutu occurred. But still the two peoples lived intermingled as one nation.

But in 1994, the Hutu population of Rwanda was persuaded to take up machetes and murder their Tutsi neighbours, in-laws, friends and colleagues.

In the fastest genocide in history, Hutus killed one million people within 100 days. The speed of the killing was extraordinary given that the weapons used were the most basic of implements.

In order for genocide to occur, the Hutu Power extremists who organised the massacres had to persuade an entire population that they were threatened by a foreign and contaminating force.

In the months preceding the genocide, radio broadcasts had incited murder. They used the language of disgust and infestation. Tutsis were called inyenzi, cockroaches. The choice of metaphor is telling. In order to get rid of a cockroach infestation, you must kill all of them. Leave just a few, and the infestation will return. Crushing a cockroach that is carrying eggs merely spreads the eggs, which then hatch. In Rwanda, foetuses were routinely ripped from the wombs of pregnant women and butchered.