When assessing ethnic rivalry between the Hutus and the Tutsi it is evident that it was one of the significant factors that lead to the Rwandan Genocide. However, other contributing factors such as, the assassination of both the Rwandan and Burundi Presidents, the flaws in the demographic nature of the country, and the economic stance of the country were also integral to the outbreak of the Rwandan Genocide.
On the 6th April 1994 the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were both assassinated leading to the start of the Rwandan Genocide. The president of Rwanda Juvénal Habyarimana (Hutu) was with the president of Burundi Cyprien Ntaryamira (Hutu) at the time when their plane was shot down leading to some "The most horrible and systematic human massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis”. The Hutu rebels then began their massacre slaughtering 800,000 Tutsis within on hundred days, three quarters of the Tutsi population. Ethnic rivalry between the two groups, the Tutsi and the Hutu, played a large role in the assassination of both the presidents. In the lead up to the assassination the two groups had been continuously fighting due to the fact that they both believed that they were miss-treated through previous moments in history. In both the genocides of 1972 and 1994 the Hutu people were seeking revenge on the Tutsi people because of how they were treated in the past. This treatment of the Hutu people escalated when the Belgian colonists arrived in 1916, producing identity cards classifying the people according to their ethnicity. The Belgians favoured the Tutsi people, which led to better qualities of living, which infuriated the Hutu people “In Rwanda that genocide happened because the way the Belgians judged the people”. The rivalry between the two