among male youth, who were particularly vulnerable to recruitment by militias (C. Newbury and D. Newbury 1999: 91–92; D. Newbury 1998).
During this period, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, outside powers that controlled the flow of economic resources to Rwanda pushed the democratization process and legitimization of multipartyism (De Lame 2005:65). This reorganized structures of power and forced Habyarimana to open political space to others, which angered powerful members of his own regime and contributed to elites trying to eliminate challengers and reassert their hold on social, economic, and political dominance (Longman 1995; C. Newbury and D. Newbury 1999; D. Newbury 1998:80, 89). In 1991, Rwanda legitimized a multiparty system, which intensified the contest for political power. In 1993, with the support of the major Western powers, Tanzania brokered peace talks between the Rwandan government and the RPF that resulted in a power-sharing agreement known as the Arusha Accords.
Scholars have shown that during the early 1990s the organizational planning and conditions for genocide were put in place, countering interpretations dominant in the Western media that the violence was the unfortunate escalation of a civil war or a spontaneous eruption of hatred among people who were inherently violent (Des Forges 1999; Lemarchand 1995; Longman 1995; Mamdani 2001; C. Newbury 1995; D. Newbury 1995; Prunier 1995). They have shown that the genocide resulted not from a failed state but rather, from an unduly strong one, where state apparatuses—political organizations, military, and the administration—were used to commit genocide (Des Forges 1995; Lemarchand 2009:85). Organization involved distinct sets of actors, including Habyarimana’s core group, the Presidential Guard, rural organizers at the commune level, and civilian militias called Interahamwe, “those who stand together.” The genocide ideology of hatred targeting Tutsi was key to these efforts and was well established by 1992 (Des Forges 1995). Planning intensified after the signing of the Arusha Accords in 1993, when hardline elements within the Rwandan government and other Hutu extremists exploited ethnically based ideologies to mobilize the population as a strategy for maintaining power and simultaneously stepped up efforts to organize, indoctrinate, and arm segments of their supporters. Consistent with the dominant narrative, scholars have pointed to the role of the media and schools in fomenting ethnic division in the lead up to the genocide, particularly by propagating racist anti-Tutsi writings, cartoons, and songs, often based on the Hamitic ideology (Chrétien 1995; Des Forges 1995; King 2014; Lemarchand 2009). The international development aid system supported the processes that underlay the genocide by, for example, financing the processes of social exclusion, perpetuating humiliating practices, and ignoring growing racialization (Uvin 1998:224–238). The international arms trade in the wake of the end of the Cold War made it possible for the government to provide weapons for the newly developed militias (D. Newbury 1998:90). International actors knew about, but did not try to stop, growing anti-Tutsi massacres in the 1990s, and France even assisted the Habyarimana regime’s military efforts against the RPF (Kroslak 2007; Lemarchand 2009:84).
On April 6, 1994, as President Habyarimana was flying home from finalizing details of the Arusha Accords, his plane was shot down above the Kigali airport. This plane crash, blamed by the Hutu government on Tutsi rebels, triggered a coordinated attempt by Hutu extremists to eliminate the Tutsi population. Within hours, a campaign of violence ignited in the capital and began to spread through the country. The Tutsi-led RPF broke the Arusha cease-fire and relaunched a military campaign, resuming its civil war against the Hutu regime. The country was thrown into confusion. The violence was carried out by highly organized state armies, as well as the coordinated and trained Interahamwe militias, which were groups of armed youth indoctrinated in the Hutu-power ideology who killed and openly terrorized the population. Though a U.N. peacekeeping force had twenty-five thousand troops on the ground, they were quickly withdrawn, along with foreign nationals. Adding to the confusion of the period, the vast majority of Hutu took to the roads, fleeing the violence and the approach of the RPF.
The details of the violence were horrifying, intimate, and unimaginable.13 People targeted by the genocidal regime, whether Tutsi or Hutu opposition, had little chance of survival. Soldiers and police officers encouraged or coerced civilian involvement and forced civilians to “kill or be killed.” Tutsi and those trying to protect them were massacred en masse in churches, schools, and public buildings where they gathered seeking safety, and were sought out in their homes and hunted while fleeing. Many of the people who killed their fellow Rwandans—often intimately, with machetes—had grown up together, went to the same churches and schools, and even intermarried and were related. Women of childbearing age were targeted, especially as objects of rape, sexual humiliation, and sexual mutilation (D. Newbury 1998). Identity cards—introduced by the Belgians but maintained by the First and Second Republics—were used by killers to determine victims’ ethnicity. While the genocide spread nationwide, violence did not play out uniformly across the country; some politicians fought to avoid escalation of violence, and many individuals sought to save neighbors (Des Forges 1999; Janzen 2000; Jefremovas 1995; Longman 1995; Nduwayo 2002; D. Newbury 1998:80–82). In areas where peasants were relatively cohesive and empowered, they were less susceptible to ethnic appeals, and therefore violence had to be imported from outside (Des Forges 1999; Longman 1995). Many people protected others with whom they felt bonds of kin, neighborhood, religion, or humanity.
Researchers have shown clearly the egregiousness of the international community’s failure to act, detailing the ways the U.N. Security Council and key actors such as the United States hesitated and did not intervene in ways that could have saved lives (Dallaire 2003; Power 2002; Prunier 1995). Members of the French government are widely understood, within Rwanda and outside, to have supported the genocidal regime and to have led a controversial intervention (Operation Turquoise) that resulted in aiding the escape of thousands of perpetrators (Kroslak 2007).
Debate remains on many points over the genocide: why people joined the killers, and how to understand the link between elite propaganda and individual actions; what the scale and meaning of Hutu casualties were; what the scale of participation was—how many Hutu participated versus how many tried to save neighbors, and how wide the web of collective guilt should be cast; and whether the RPF fighters were heroes or aggressors (Davenport and Stam 2009; Fujii 2009; Straus 2006; Vidal 1998). Those who call this period a civil war and negate the existence of genocide, equating all the killing during this period, are in disagreement with prevailing opinion and scholarship—and, since 2008, in contravention of Rwanda’s genocide ideology law.
Further, the quantification of genocide victims remains highly contested. In the immediate wake of the genocide, scholars quoted a figure of approximately five hundred thousand victims, but consensus emerged at around eight hundred thousand victims within several years (e.g., Lemarchand 1995, 2009). In April 2004, on the eve of the ten-year anniversary commemorations, the government announced the tally was 937,000 victims, whom they claimed were predominantly Tutsi, and it said that with gacaca ongoing, more victims would likely be identified (Kazoora 2004). This official number rose to more than one million (Kagire 2009). Most scholars believe that both official figures are inflated, and that these numbers must include Hutu, including those killed by the RPF or the newly named Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) during and after the genocide. Davenport and Stam controversially claim that a majority of the victims were most likely Hutu, and that the events should be considered a politicide rather than a genocide (Davenport and Stam 2009).
The genocide is understood to have ended on July 4, 1994, when the RPF captured Kigali. The RPF put in place a government generally based on one that was mandated by the Arusha Accords, and it tried to govern in a situation marked by massive death and destruction, devastated infrastructure, and displaced population. The late 1990s continued to be marked by instability and violence. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsi returnees quickly began to cross the borders from Burundi and Uganda, while hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees left the country for refugee camps in the DRC. Hutu insurgents living in these refugee camps launched periodic attacks into Rwanda, and RPA responded with attacks against them, under General Kagame. In 1996, the RPA was involved militarily in the DRC, both to clear the refugee camps in efforts to eliminate the rebel threat and to help overthrow President Mobutu, widely considered a dictator, and install Lauren-Désiré
