Rwandan Genocide Dbq

Rwandan Genocide DBQ Genocide, and act that said to never occur again by the Genocide Convention, has come through time and time again. Each genocide, including the Rwandan Genocide, leaving countless numbers of men, women, and children wounded and lifeless. The imperialism brought by the Belgian empire onto Rwanda was the start of the deadly massacre. The lack of international aid from the rest of the world caused the genocide to last longer and longer eventually ending after 100 days. Finally a young population gave the people of Rwanda a little more motivation to start the horrifying mass killing. Imperialism, lack of international aid, and a young population were all factors in the start of the genocide but clearly imperialism is the most significant which without the genocide would have never started. As the Belgians came down to the weak and unstable country of Rwanda they had one thing in mind, to conquer their land. This was the initial goal of the Belgians which later turned out to be the most contributing factor to the Rwandan Genocide. It all started with the classification, done by the Belgians with I.D. cards, of the Rwandan people into two major groups which were the Hutu and the Tutsi by their physical features (Doc. 1&4). The Belgians described the Tutsi, the minority group as intelligent and skillful and gave the privileges over the Hutu who were the majority group and described as simple (Doc.4). As time passed and the power of the Tutsis got to their head they started to abuse their rights which angered the Hutu. A suspicious plane crash in April 1994 killed booth Rwandan president Habyarimana and the second president of Burundi which sparked the genocide. Within a few hours of the crash, Hutu extremists executed eleven UN peacekeepers from Belgium and started to carry out a well organized series of massacres (Doc. 4). Civilian death squads called Interhamwe had training prior to the genocide and were responsible for the largest massacres,