The Rwandan genocide was one of the most intensive killing campaigns in human history, leaving over 800,000 people dead in only 100 days. Most of the killing was carried out by two Hutu radical militant groups: the Interahamwe and the Impuzamugambi. Armed, backed, and led by the government of Rwanda, the MRND, the Interahamwe were the driving force of the genocide, comprised mostly of young Hutu men, brainwashed by the “Hutu Power” ideology, which aimed to kill every last Tutsi and Tutsi sympathizer in Rwanda.[1] Most of the people killed were ethnic Tutsis, but thousands of Tutsis sympathizers and moderate Hutus were left dead in the streets, with another two million refugees packed in disease-ridden camps in neighboring Burundi, Uganda, and Zaire.[2] Although this conflict may seem to be a solely Rwandan affair, the source of the genocide lies in colonial times, when German and Belgian colonizers divided the nation and set the stage for one of the largest mass killings in history.

            The first European country to occupy and colonize Rwanda was the Germans, who held the territory from 1894 to 1916, the end of World War I, after which the country was taken over by the Belgians, who ruled until independence in 1962. Although Rwanda was only under direct colonial influence for 68 years, the impact was devastating and has lasted to this day. The Belgians favored the Tutsi minority, which constituted between about 15 percent of the population at the time of the 1994 genocide, creating a sharp divide between the ethnic groups. In pre-colonial Rwanda, the Tutsis had dominated the small Rwandan aristocracy, but ethnic divisions between them and the majority Hutus, who accounted for the other 85 percent of the population during the genocide, were always peaceful. As Stephen D. Wrage states in his paper Genocide in Rwanda: Draft Case Study for Teaching Ethics and International Affairs:

 

 "It is often remarked that the violence between Hutus and Tutsis goes back to time immemorial and can never be averted, but Belgian records show that in fact there was a strong sense among Rwandans [...] of belonging to a Rwandan nation, and that before around 1960, violence [along] ethnic lines was uncommon and mass murder of the sort seen in 1994 was unheard of.”[3]

 

By coming and instituting laws and policies that favored the Tutsis over the Hutus, the Belgians created friction within a functioning social system that changed the course of the nation. The Belgians came to the conclusion that Tutsis were the superior ethnic group using physical characteristics as a guide; the Tutsis were generally taller and more “European” looking than the Hutu, who were stockier and shorter. Based on these physical traits, they decided that they were two different races and that the Tutsi were the “master race”, earning them higher positions in the Belgian Rwandan auxiliaries.[4] To ensure that this divide was clear, the Belgians instituted the identity-card system in 1933 that designated every Rwandan as Hutu or Tutsi.[5] These cards would become very important during the genocide, as they were used to identify and isolate the Tutsi victims.

            As many African colonies began to free themselves from their European colonizers, it was the better educated and more economically successful Tutsis who led the charge for independence from Belgium. However belgium, not wanting to relinquish its control of the country, decided to switch their allegiance to the Hutus. As the oppressed became the oppressors, many Hutus saw this as a call or reason to attack the Tutsis, leading to the murder of 15,000 Tutsis and thousands of refugees who escaped to neighboring Uganda and Burundi between 1959 and 1962, when Rwanda gained its independence.[6] Any Tutsis that remained in Rwanda after this point were stripped of any wealth or status that they had. This widened the social and ethnic divide between the Tutsis and Hutus that was already a major source of conflict.

            Since the genocide, the Rwandan government, headed by President Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu, and Vice President and Defense Minister Paul Kagame, a Tutsi, have made strides to become more united as a nation. Habyarimana’s NRMD party, which had played a key role in organizing the genocide, was outlawed, and a new constitution adopted in 2003 eliminated reference to ethnicity. The new constitution was followed by Kagame’s election to a 10-year term as Rwanda’s president and the country’s first-ever legislative elections.[7] The elimination of ethnicity is a huge step towards recovering from the genocide, but it will take many years for Tutsis and Hutus to become united again, especially when there were neighbors brutally killing neighbors in the street with machetes, but it is a step in the right direction. Who knows where Rwanda would be without Belgian colonization, but Rwanda is still struggling to erase what Belgium did a half century after it achieved independence.

            Although conflict between the Tutsi and Hutu did exist before the colonization of Rwanda, Belgian colonialism certainly heightened it, and their favoritism and divisive policies only served as a method for creating a hatred of each other, which manifested itself in violence. On April 6th, 1994, when a plane carrying Rwandan president Habyarimana and Burundi’s president Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down over Kigali, leaving no survivors, the true genocide started. This was the final mark of Belgium’s colonial legacy, and although the actual genocide began at that moment, the foundation had been put in place almost a century before.

 

 

 

[1] BBC News newsgroup, "Rwanda: How the Genocide Happened," May 17, 2011. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-13431486.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Wrage, Stephen D., “Genocide in Rwanda: Draft Case Study for Teaching Ethics and International Affairs,” unpublished paper, 2000.

[4] Prunier, Gérard. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1997.

[5] Ibid.

[6] William Mitchell College of Law. "Rwandan Genocide." World Without Genocide.

     Last modified 2012. http://worldwithoutgenocide.org/genocides-and-conflicts/rwandan-genocide.

[7] Ibid.