Rewanda Genocide Essay

In 1994 a genocide occurred in Rewanda that lasted for 100 days in its entirety. This event was one of the most devastating moments to hit the world. On April 5, 1994 a plane carrying the president of Rewanda, Juvenal Habyarimana, and the president of Burundian, crashed. This event started the tragedy. The uprising was against the Tutsi and Hutu people and spanned the entire country. It took only a few hours for the rebels to take over the capital of Kigali and the massacre continued until the Hutu movement was beaten.

The Rwandan Patriotic (RPF) front was targeted for extermination by the Hutus. As the violence continued to get worse, the RPF fought back but this only created a combination of civil war as well as human genocide. The brutality of the mass extermination
Rwanda gained their independence from Belgium in 1961. This happened after the nationalist group known as the Parmehutu led the social revolution which overthrew the tutsi ruling class. The revolution was responsible for about 20,000 Tutsis and another 200,000 were exiled to other countries. Unfortunately the Tutsis left were few and were mostly the result of family ties, or intermarriage, but were discriminated against greatly and being lesser people by the Hutu government. Tutsis who had been exiled and demanded the right to return home and they formed the RPF in 1985. They wanted an end to the discrimination against them in Rwanda. Working from neighboring Uganda, they invaded Ruwanda in 1990 which only fueled the hatred of the Tutsi by the Hutsu. It was the Tutsi invasion that paved the way to the genocide as well as the many decades of oppression and the fear the Hutsu could eventually lose power. In addition to the Tutsi people who were murdered those Hutu sympathizers who sheltered the Tutsi by providing aid and hiding them were also