Rwandan Genocide

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This episode contains content that some may find distressing. It's late September 2006, in a small village in Rwanda's eastern province, the day dawns bright and humid.

“A woman pulls up on the creaking wooden door of her small house and steps out into the sticky heat.”

Follows a familiar dusty path through the village, a group of giggling school children rush past, and one of her neighbours calls a greeting. She raises her hand in knowledge, but does not stop. She has no time to linger and chat today. [MUSIC] The dirt road is fringed with lush green trees, home to a dazzling array of bird species. Their raucous cacophony singing into the vivid blue sky.

Soon, she comes to the wooden pens that house her two dairy cows. Her main source of income, especially since the death of her husband.

Usually, the milking is the first job of the day, but today her daughter is doing it in her place.

“She calls out to thank her and continues towards the village centre.”

In the main square, a long table has been set out in the shade, with six elders already sitting behind it, sporting distinctive green, yellow and blue striped sashes. This is a gachacha court, and these people, the judges, who will determine the fate of the accused due to stand trial today. Rose of straight-backed wooden chairs stand before them, already filled with many of the woman's neighbours. She sets down beside an older villager in a vibrant lime green dress and matching head wrap,

who gives her a small smile and squeezes her hand. Today is going to be difficult for them all. [BLANK_AUDIO] Now the chatter of the crowd immediately dies down, as a young man in a brown shirt is brought to stand before the chief judge. Some members of the crowd, cheer, shouting insults at the man until the chairman calls for quiet.

In a booming voice, he lays out the crimes of which the man stands accused. The murder of four people during the 1994 genocide.

The defendant hangs his head as the judge calls for the first witness.

One by one, villagers testified to the violent act he committed. An old man claims he saw him wielding a bloody machete and entering the church. Someone sobs as they ask him why he killed their son. Soon it is the woman's turn to stand. Though her hands shake, her voice is firm as she asks him the questions that have tormented her for years.

Did he kill her husband and wear his body? The man looks straight at her. He did not kill her husband, he tells her. But he did watch his body being thrown into the mass grave on the edge of town. A abruptly, the woman sits down.

She barely hears as the judge pronounces the man's sentence and he has led away. All she can focus on is the ever present bird song ringing out into the clear blue sky.

For much of the rest of the world, the Rwandan genocide might be disappearing...

But for her, the horror will never fade.

“For hundreds of years, Rwanda's Hutu and Tutsi groups had lived in relative harmony.”

But the arrival of European colonists enforced and exaggerated the differences between them until from the mid-20th century, resentment began to boil over. By 1994, the two groups were sworn enemies. Over 100 days, violence engulfed the country as members of the Hutu majority worked systematically

to exterminate the Tutsi.

Spurred on by government and military officials, neighbor turned against neighbor, friend against friend, until hundreds of thousands lay dead. But what precipitated this senseless mass killing?

“Why were so many ordinary people willing to participate?”

Responsibility does the international community bear for the bloodshed. And John Hopkins, from the noise of podcast network this, is a short history of the Rwandan genocide. The twisted roots of the Rwandan genocide lie in the country's colonial past. Before 1858, this small landlocked country in East Africa was unknown to Europeans. Although exact patterns of migration and settlement in the region are still debated, for several centuries, it has been home to three groups.

The Twar, the Hutu and the Tutsi. The Tutsi, with their large herds of cattle, gained economic and political power and found a monarchy in what is now the territorial heart of Rwanda.

“Alan C. Stan is Professor of Public Policy and Politics at the University of Virginia.”

The Hutu and the Twar, their agriculturalists, they don't have a particularly hierarchical or feudal-based society. Some 400 years ago, groups of cattle herders, pastoralists arrived from what today we would think of as Somalia. Over the next couple of hundred years, those people, what we would call the Tutsi, they developed something that the Europeans who arrived in the 1800s recognize as a relatively modern feudal society. By the 19th century, the labels of Hutu and Tutsi have more to do with class position than ethnic or tribal identity.

The Hutu are farmers and Tutsi are herders, both groups speak the same language, Kenya Rwanda. They share a belief system and cultural practices, including ancestor worship. And there is frequent intermarriage and movement between the two groups. Their identities are somewhat fluid. If you shift your employment, your identity shifts as well. Now, we don't know for sure how much shifting back and forth there is, but it's certainly taking place. Anytime a Hutu would become a property owner would begin to own cattle, they would essentially assimilate into the Tutsi identity, the Tutsi class.

So these identities of Hutu and Tutsi are more class-based at this point than what we would think of today as rigid ethnic identities. And so there's also mobility the other way. You can go from being Tutsi and to become a Hutu if you become a banana farmer. This fluidity is upset in the late 19th century during the period that becomes known as the Scramble for Africa. At the 1884 Berlin Conference, the continent is carved up between Avaricious European nations.

Many of whose representatives have never set foot on the continent. The geographic area that includes modern derewanda is assigned to German control.

And in 1890, the country is formally incorporated into German East Africa. In the Tutsi monarchy and upper classes, the Germans see a way to govern the country remotely. Then during the chaos of the First World War, Belgium invades Rwanda in 1916. They retain control over the territory after the end of the conflict, and for the Tutsi elites, cooperation with these new colonial powers maintains their social position. The Europeans, and it doesn't really matter who they are, essentially just take over at the top is indigenous sort of feudal monarchy-based system.

There's a King Robogiri who essentially is kept in charge, and then there's a...

And so essentially instead of having to overthrow and crush the entire system, all the Europeans have to do is co-opt it.

“During the period of colonial rule, Hutu and Tutsi are transformed from markers of socio-economic status into ethnic labels.”

Under the influence of race, science, ideologies, colonial administrators, and missionaries see the upper class Tutsi as necessarily racially superior to the agrarian Hutu.

In 1931, the Belgians introduced identity cards, marking Rwanda's with an indelible ethnicity for the first time.

The effect of this was that it essentially locks in place the ethnic identities of Hutu and Tutsi. Now, the impact of that is that over time within the Hutu, we start to have landowners, we start to have business owners, we start to have people who previously would have been assimilated into the monarchist class or what an England people would think of as the upper class, the upper class is.

“Now, ethnic identity and class identity essentially become very rigid, and this is the beginning of creating all kinds of really serious identity-based problems.”

The crystallization of what was once a more fluid class system will have dramatic and deadly consequences in the years to come.

In World War, the newly formed United Nations decrees that Belgium must begin preparing the country's path to independence, but this is complicated by the now inflexible divide between Hutu and Tutsi. So, we have these rigid ethnic identities, we have a political system that previously had allowed for the assimilation of new elites into this upper class when now that's not possible anymore. And so, we start to see demands for greater political representation, greater redistribution around, and here's where it gets really ugly, because these ethnic identities have locked in place through the colonial ethnic identity systems, the demands are ethnic-based.

By the 1950s, Rwanda's population is almost 90% Hutu and 10% Tutsi, with the attuar making up less than 1%. But for the Hutu majority, self-governance means not just liberation from European control, but the overthrow of the Tutsi upper class, and all who support them.

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As the country prepares for independence, separate Hutu and Tutsi political parties form. In 1957, Hutu politicians and academics lay out their vision for the country's future. The group of Hutu intellectual leaders issue what becomes known as the Hutu manifesto. And this is explicitly, you know, modeled after Marx's Communist manifesto, after the American Declaration of Independence, all of these essentially precursors of colonial or class-based systems, saying, the underclass, the colonies saying, "We're done," and we want democracy.

Two years later, on the first of November, 1959, the Hutu revolution begins.

It is sparked by the public beating of Hutu politician and district mayor Dominique Mabonia Matua, by a member of the Tutsi political group.

“Soon, reprisal attacks on the Tutsi begin. Between 1959 and 1961, as many as 20,000 Tutsi are killed.”

The Belgians had intended to stall Rwandan independence for as long as possible, to protect their economic interests in the country. But in the face of large-scale public unrest, they now declare the support for democratic majority rule and abandon the absolutist Tutsi monarchy. Elections are soon held and the result is unsurprising, Hutu parties win 83% of the vote, and a provisional government is established under Mabonia Matua. A year later, a referendum sees 80% of Rwandan's voting for the abolition of the monarchy.

“The last king flees the country with thousands of his supporters, and in the face of increasing violence, many ordinary Tutsi civilians also seek refuge in neighboring countries. The majority had north into Uganda.”

But if anyone hopes the ethnic tensions will dissipate, when Rwandan is finally granted independence on the 1st of July 1962, they will be sorely disappointed.

Militant Tutsi refugees soon begin conducting attacks on Rwandan. They are seeking a right to return to the country of their birth and for Tutsi governance over this new nation. The Hutu dominated Rwandan government response by forming malicious to indiscriminately arrest or kill any Tutsi remaining in the country. In 1963 alone, some 10,000 Tutsi civilians are massacred, and tens of thousands more seek refuge in neighboring countries. It is a vicious cycle that will repeat in the decades to come. The Rwandan government remains who too dominated in the decades after independence. Quoters are put in place to minimize Tutsi influence in educational institutions and governmental bodies, and large scale massacres occur in 1967 and 1973.

The latter is also the year that President Habib Yarremana comes to power in a military coup, promising to end the corruption of the previous regime. But he will soon operate as a dictator, hoarding power for himself and among his trusted circle and banning all other parties. In 1979, a military organization is formed among Tutsi refugees in Uganda, which will later take the name of the Rwandan patriotic front or RPF. But fearful of their growing power, Uganda's president Mussavini, soon turns against them.

Late '80s, he said, "To the RPF leadership, you gotta go. I'm kicking you out." So, we get the first sort of modern era invasion from Uganda into Rwandan in '88, '89.

“The Huchu army is manages to push back this Rwanda patriotic front invasion. The RPF continues to arm continues to train fast forward to the early 1990s, and now Mussavini's like, "No, you have to leave.”

We're going to destroy you." So, they invade again. They carve out an area in northern Rwanda that becomes essentially RPF-controlled territory. This second incursion by the RPF in 1990 becomes known as the Rwandan Civil War. As the RPF take control of the north of the country, some 600,000 civilians are displaced internally by the fighting. Among Huchu elites, the development prompts a hardening against Ordinary Tutsi, who becomes seen as an internal threat. In December 1990, the Kangora newspaper publishes what it calls the Huchu 10 Commandments, which condemns any Huchu collaboration with Tutsi people,

and the propaganda against the Tutsi minority only intensifies as the fighting continues. After a ceasefire is negotiated in 1991, peace talks between the Habya Ramana government and the RPF led by a man named Paul Kagame, begin the following July. The next year, peace accords us signed in Arusha Tanzania. In 1993, the United Nations says, "All right, here's what we're going to do. We're going to restore a democratic system. In the meantime, what we're going to do is we will give the RPF 5 out of 21 government ministries.

The Rwandan National Army will be roughly 20% RPF 80% Huchu, and so it's goin...

But by now, Habya Ramana is fighting on multiple fronts.

“Externally against the RPF rebels and internally against both moderate Huchu opposition seeking democracy and Huchu radicals who oppose the power sharing agreement.”

Only days after the peace accords are signed, the radio station RTLM begins broadcasting Huchu's supremacy content, including virulent anti-tutti propaganda. Hardliner Army Officials start organizing, training and arming thousands of Huchu youth militias, supposedly for self-defense in the event of another civil war. The reason for the foundation of such militias soon comes to light.

Since the signing of the Arusha Accords, a UN peacekeeping force comprised of soldiers from Belgium, Bangladesh, Ghana and Tunisia has been stationed in Kagali, Rwandus capital.

And informant now tells the commander, Romeo Delere, that target lists of Tutsi and political moderates are being drawn up by extremists in the government and Army. He estimates that 1000 Tutsi and Kagali could be found and killed in just 20 minutes.

“It seems that Huchu supremacists have decided the only way to ensure the peace and safety of the country is to eliminate the RPF and possibly all Tutsi.”

Later those accused of genocide will testify that the plan was intended as a deterrent against a feared incursion from the RPF stationed in territory that control in northern Rwanda.

And so the Huchu essentially developed a plan where we tell the Tutsi if you invade will kill everybody, and that becomes the plan for the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda.

The Huchu plan essentially has two parts. One, they're going to target the leadership class of the Tutsi identity group. At the same time, we're going to solve their problem once and for all, so the other part of the plan is to kill all the Tutsi. It's not only the Huchu extremists who are making plans. The RPF has signed the peace accords and in theory is preparing for power sharing in future elections. But later testimony suggests that the leadership is concerned that in a country when nearly 90% of the population is Huchu, Tutsi parties will never be voted in, even when free and fair elections are held. Power may well have to be taken by force.

“So from the Tutsi perspective, they say to themselves, well, we have this window of opportunity. We have a little bit less than two years to completely restore ourselves to power.”

By the beginning of 1994, the stage is set for extreme violence. Rwanda is a tender box awaiting a spark. It is late evening, on the 6th of April 1994, at Kanombay Military Camp at the Edge of Kegali. An off-tuti soldier with the Rwanda National Army stands outside his barracks, enjoying the last faltering rays of sunlight, as dusk steels in around him. It digs around in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. Striking the match, he lights up and breaves in deeply, enjoying the relative quiet after a busy day.

Soon, the faint sounds of city traffic are interrupted by the distinctive roar of a plane. Not just any plane, but President Habiya Ramana's jet. The man scans the darkening sky until he spots the aircraft's lights. It is circling low as it comes into land at the nearby Kegali airport. Ideally, watching its descent, it takes another drag on his cigarette.

But now, the plane's wing is hit by some kind of projectile. As the soldier stands frozen, a fireball blossoms towards the back of the aircraft. The air is rent by the screech of tearing metal. Within moments, the entire plane is engulfed in flames. Shouts echo around him as soldiers emerge from various buildings to stand in the parade ground.

Every eye is trained on the fiery wreckage tumbling through the twilight sky, falling inexorably towards the presidential palace a few streets away.

Suddenly, realizing what this means, the soldier comes to his senses and runs...

He slams open the door and hurdles up the stairs into his dormitory.

“He grabs his green uniform from his wardrobe, and as he hops about getting the trousers on, he shouts to his bewildered comrades to do the same.”

Questions about what has happened come at him thick and fast from all corners of the room. Zipping, the fly, and jamming his berry onto his head, he turns to face them. The president's plane has been shot down, he announces. Everyone needs to get dressed and armed now. Suddenly, a bugle sounds, the call to action on the room bursts into life.

Panic men dragging uniforms out of cupboards. The soldier allows himself a grim smile of satisfaction before heading to the armory. They have to be ready for whatever may be coming. The same happens. Among the passengers of the downed plane, are not only a president-habi-erimana, but also the president of Burundi,

“and several officials from the Ministry of Defense.”

When the first soldiers arrive at the scene of the crash inside the grounds of the presidential palace,

it is immediately clear that there are no survivors. What is less certain is who launched the two surface-to-air missiles that brought the aircraft down. Two possible perpetrators are identified, either the RPF or who-to-hardliners launching a coup against a president they see as two moderate. Now, question becomes obviously who shot it down. The evidence today best determines points to the RPF under the orders of Paul Kagami.

How do we know this? A former member of the RPF flipped sides and testified against the RPF at the ICTR, unsurprisingly, Paul Kagami and his people in Rwanda today say, "No, no, no." It was essentially a coup within the Hutu, which there's president for. Even now, three decades on, blame cannot be conclusively assigned.

“What is incontrovertible is what happens next.”

Hutu supremacists, the same figures who'd been spreading anti-tutsy propaganda by radio and in the newspapers quickly work to seize control of the government.

They then initiate the first part of the genocide plan, the killing of everyone on the target lists,

predominantly elite-tutsy and moderate Hutu politicians. They first ordered the presidential guard to kill the moderate Hutu Prime Minister Agate Ullinji Yamana, the first woman ever to hold this post. Early in the morning they pulled the seventh sheet and her husband are murdered, along with the ten UN peacekeepers from Belgium who'd been sent to protect her.

Shortly afterwards, Colonel Bagassora, a hardliner in the Ministry of Defense, and perhaps the chief architect of the genocide plan sends a press release informing the population that the army is now in charge. The situation escalates as elite military units work their way through the lists. The assassination of the president then triggers beginnings of the killings.

What happens then?

So, first week of April, the first thing we see is the killings off of the name lists that had been put together previously.

The RPF then saying we're going to save all these people, invades from Northern Noanda. The RPF launched their offensive from their northern stronghold on the 8th of April, as militia members and soldiers in Kagali began killing Tutsi civilians in the street. The reasons why the RPF invaded this moment are still murky. Perhaps it is to try and prevent a genocide that they know is coming, as Paul Kagami claims.

Or perhaps the chaos represents an opportunity for the RPF that Kagami cannot ignore, regardless of the cost that might be paid by the Tutsi population. He knows that while this plan is going on, there will be just total chaos and they'll be able to take over control of the country. What I want to say to you is that you don't want to get a lot of studies.

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In the face of the escalating crisis in Gagali, the response of the international community is to withdraw from Rwanda. Having lost ten of its peacekeepers defending the Prime Minister, Belgium recalls all of its soldiers. France, which since independence has been the European country

with the greatest economic stake in the country,

begins evacuating who to allies and French citizens. Within a few days of the presidential assassination, the United Nations has dramatically reduced the number of peacekeeping troops stationed in the country to a token force of just a few hundred, despite delaires' objections.

Nobody wants to do anything about it, because it seems very dangerous.

“Now, we know President Clinton, who, afterwards, he claims,”

had I know that I would have done something. Communications were broken off, we did, no way of knowing. Well, it turns out we know that President Clinton knew very early on before the genocide begins, that the risk of genocide was high, and then in the first two weeks of April,

we know that he knew on a daily basis exactly what was going on. The international community is well aware that mass killings in Gagali have begun. Thanks to the informant who spoke to Delere in January, they also know that a plan for widespread genocide exists.

And yet, in April 1994, the United Nations and the leaders of the world's

most powerful countries abandoned the Tutsi of Rwanda to their fate.

Soon, the killings move from targeted attacks on named individuals to the indiscriminate murder of all Tutsi. Military commanders begin calling on who to across the country to attack Tutsi everywhere. Tutsi propaganda continues to be pumped out over the airwaves

through radio station RTLM, which in the years since has been nicknamed "Radio Genocide."

“Making you ring out how important the radio effects”

were is very difficult. And it totally, it seems pretty important. The broadcast themselves are horrific. I mean, there's a DJ on the radio telling people, "Here's tonight's news, and by the way, go on Kill Your Neighbors."

On RTLM, the Tutsi's are referred to frequently as cockroaches. In mid-April, the broadcasts begin calling for a final war to exterminate them all. By the 14th of April, violence against the Tutsi is widespread throughout Rwanda. Within the span of another week, a systematic program of genocide

has become the norm in almost every region of the country. As with atrocities committed in more recent years, women and children are targeted at the same rate as men. This is not an attack on potential RPF combatants. It is a campaign to wipe the Tutsi off the face of the earth.

Many of these attacks are carried out by the Huitu militias that were trained and armed in the month leading up to April 1994. Prominent among these are groups known as the Interahamway, meaning those who attack together. Chillingly, they often target people seeking shelter in churches and other community spaces. We have mass killing a community centers.

A majority of those types of killings are carried out by the Interahamway. During previous purges, coups, episodes of mass violence, community centers churches and monasteries have been safe places. If you were a Huitu, if you got to one of these community places, got inside, you were safe.

Well, part of the plan of the genocide in 1994 was we're going to take control of the national radio system. We're going to encourage people to go to these community centers and then we're going to kill everybody in the community centers. Dozens upon dozens of these centers around the entire country,

everyone inside is killed regardless of identity. It just kill everybody. But it's not only the militias that carry out the campaign of extermination. Neighbor turns against neighbor and tens of thousands of civilians also take part in the atrocities.

Groups comprising both militia members and ordinary people go house to house in the local area hunting down Tutsi. The killings are often low-tech and intimate,

Involving machetes and blunt objects.

Some victims are drowned or heard it into buildings that are set a light.

“Roadblocks also play a crucial role in finding and murdering fleeing Tutsi.”

A lot of people get killed at these roadblocks at night. One of the exacerbating factors is a lot of the people at these roadblocks that are banning or staffing the roadblocks. They're teenagers, teenage males, and they're drunk. They've been given huge gerrycans of banana beer

to get them through the night to help them stay awake. And so what happens is, Tutsi, who to, whatever, they're hiding during the day and they're moving at night. And then they come upon one of these roadblocks. Now a roadblocks sounds very formal, but it could just be a bamboo pole across the road

to stop people in the road is the road made via trail.

And if you can't produce your identification, if you can't convince these drunk 13 to 17-year-olds who they are, this would be a happy day.

“It is a slaughter of such immense proportions,”

that even the natural world is affected. Witnesses speak of black clouds of birds of prey, vultures and buzzards, and aerial map of the massacre sites as they gather to feast on corpses. By the end of April, the Niabaronga river is choked with bodies.

And tens of thousands of dead bodies are carried into Lake Victoria, Africa's largest lake. Later, when asked to reflect on their motivations, Rwandans who took part in the massacre will provide different reasons for their actions.

In some cases, ordinary Hutu civilians claim they were controlled, coerced or forced into participating, by intra-harmway members or soldiers, or just by their peers. So, there's people that want to essentially defect from this, just as in the case when the Holocaust,

their individuals that say, "I don't want to participate in this." Now, during the Holocaust and these police battalions, if somebody didn't want to participate for the most part, they were allowed to just walk away, turn their back on what was going on.

They were probably ridiculed for it, but they weren't killed. In the Rwandan case, in many of these circumstances, if you didn't participate in the killing, you would be considered complicit and you'd be hacked up to,

which increases the odds that people will participate. Perhaps more disturbingly, a huge number take part willingly. They were motivated by personal grievances, or the chance to gain economically by looting of the homes of the murdered. A majority had brought into the dehumanizing anti-tutzy propaganda.

They described the "tutzy" as historic oppressors of the Houtu, and saw them as an existential threat to the safety and peace of the nation. A lot of ordinary people participate in this.

“I think the best comparison case is in Germany,”

the killing of the Jews in World War II, starts with virulent violent antisemitism in the 1930s. Well, that virulent violent antisemitism, sort of leading up to inculminating in Christelnocht, requires the participation of lots of ordinary Germans.

So the idea that ordinary people would participate in this kind of violence, there's more than adequate precedent for it, particularly in the German case. Houtu gangs do more than just kill the people they consider their enemy. They loot their homes, torture, living people, and mutilate corpses. And "tutzy women," as well as "houtu women" with "tutzy husbands"

are systematically subjected to sexual violence. We have horrific sexual violence that's used to intimidate women to find out where families are to punish women, literally tens of thousands of mass rapes. In many cases, perpetrators deliberately infect the "tutzy women" they assault with HIV.

According to a UN report, rape is the rule and its absence, the exception,

with over a quarter of a million women falling victim to the crime.

In the aftermath of the genocide, between 2005,000 children are born as a result of these attacks. But amidst the horror, there are glimmers of hope. It is the middle of May 1994 in a small community called Rubona Hill. This high-up, the air is chilly, especially after the warmth of the sun has gone. At a roadblock set up on the main road into the village, a man named Ezekiel Kumbanda,

Yorn's loudly and rubs his eyes. It is well passed nightfall, and he will not see his bed before dawn. Ezekiel and four other men have been guarding this stretch of road for hours.

It is not an elaborate roadblock, and the headlamps of the car that they have...

horizontally across the path to impede anyone wishing to enter or leave the village.

“Now Ezekiel's attention is drawn to the thick forest that lines the path.”

Something rustles in the undergrowth. Signaling to one of the men guarding the roadblock with him, they head towards the noise, straining to see anything in the inky blackness. Suddenly, a woman stumbles out of the trees and throws herself on the ground before them sobbing. Ezekiel can see she has a deep gas across one shoulder, crusted with dark blood.

Crying, she pleads for her life. She tells him she has lost her papers, and begs him to let her disappear back into the forest. But Ezekiel shakes his head. She needs to come with him. Grabbing her arm, he holds her to her feet, telling his companion that he's taking her into the village. The man nods and makes his way back to the roadblock.

As they walk, the woman's sob's escalate. But Ezekiel whispers to her to be quiet. They're not going to kill her. He's taking out of the local priest and will keep her safe. Soon they reach the village's church, and Ezekiel wraps smartly on its warped wooden door. It creaks open, just a crack.

When the priest sees them, he sinks with a relief, quickly opening up to hurry the woman inside,

promising her a meal and a bed for the night. Ezekiel thanks him, before heading back to the road. But as he approaches his team, he hears raised voices and hastens his step. A military Jeep comes into view.

“It is parked in front of the roadblock, engine idling, while Ezekiel talks to the village's manning it.”