The United Nations marked Monday, April 7 as the 31st anniversary of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which a million men, women, and children from the Tutsi tribe were slaughtered, along with members of the rival Hutu tribe who spoke out against the bloodbath.
“This appalling chapter in human history was not a spontaneous frenzy of horrendous violence. It was intentional, premeditated, and planned — including through hate speech that inflamed division, and spread lies and dehumanization,” said U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in a statement on Monday.
“We must learn from the terrible history of the genocide in Rwanda, and act to stem the tide of hate speech, stop disunity and discontent mutating into violence, uphold human rights, and ensure accountability,” Guterres said.
“Today, around the world, the darkest impulses of humanity are being awakened once more by the voices of extremism, division, and hate,” he said.
The U.N. Department of Global Communications worked with Rwanda’s permanent mission to the United Nations to hold a memorial ceremony in the U.N. General Assembly Hall in New York on Monday. Events were also held by the U.N. human rights office in Geneva, and at the headquarters of the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris.
Survivors and students of the Rwandan genocide might object to Guterres simplistically blaming it on “hate speech” and linking the deranged bloodbath of three decades ago to the current globalist obsession with speech codes. While radio broadcasts comparing Tutsis to “cockroaches” and calling for their killing were a part of the genocide, the real story of the genocide is much more complex and it has ramifications that cannot be addressed with “hate speech” laws.
The aftershocks of the Rwandan genocide can still be felt in the insecurity plaguing the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The insurgent alliance that has long plagued the eastern DRC, and recently launched a major offensive that captured several key cities, is supported by the Rwandan government. Rwandan troops quickly entered cities captured by the insurgents.
Rwanda, which has been governed by Tutsi leaders since the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, justifies its intervention in the DRC by claiming some of the insurgent groups are largely comprised of Hutus. Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who has been in power for over two decades, has accused the DRC government of supporting a Hutu-dominated militia called the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).
The Rwandan genocide officially began on April 7, 1994. The presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were killed on the previous night when their aircraft was shot down by a surface-to-air missile near the airport in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda.
The subsequent murder of Rwandan Prime Minister Agathe Unwilingiyimana on April 7 marked the official beginning of the genocide as reckoned by modern historians, but the aircraft shootdown was clearly the precipitating event.
The precise identity of the killers has not been established to this day but, at the time, it was widely believed that Hutu extremists conducted the assassination. The Rwandan president who was killed, Juvenal Habyarimana, was a former military officer who seized power in a 1973 coup. He was himself a Hutu, but he took a dim view of both Hutu and Tutsi insurgencies that threatened the stability of his government. Hutu extremist groups were furious with Habyarimana for cutting deals with moderate Hutu and Tutsi groups to reduce factional violence.
Habyarimana was technically in charge of a “transitional” government at the time of his death, having taken steps toward establishing a more robust multi-party system. He and Burundi President Cyprien Ntaryamira, who was also a Hutu, were on their way back from Hutu-Tutsi peace talks when their plane was shot down. Their deaths became the pretext for an orgy of Hutu revenge killings.
Among the first victims was Agathe Unwilingiyimana, the first female prime minister of Rwanda, who was murdered along with her husband and ten Belgian U.N. peacekeepers who were protecting them. She was killed a few hours after Habyarimana by Hutu extremists who wanted to eliminate all vestiges of moderate control in the Rwandan government. The killers were Rwandan soldiers who accused the prime minister of working with a Tutsi militia called the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).
The genocide was, in short, a carefully planned and orchestrated coup against the government, combined with an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Tutsis. Hutu assailants mercilessly slaughtered every Tutsi they could get their hands on, using guns, machetes, and clubs.
Families were wiped out, women were raped before they were murdered, and bodies were dumped into mass graves. Investigators say there were over 200,000 participants in the killing, making justice a project that would last for decades.
The genocide was also a civil war, and the RPF won after roughly a hundred days of fighting by capturing Kigali and overthrowing the Hutu military government. The annual genocide commemoration in Rwanda begins on April 7 and lasts for one hundred days, concluding with the observance of “Liberation Day” on July 4.
A multi-ethnic “transitional” government was formally inaugurated on July 19, 1994. The first president was a Hutu named Pasteur Bizimungu.
The current president, Paul Kagame, was an RPF leader during the genocide who assumed the transitional presidency in 2000, then became the first — and to date, only — president of the new permanent government in 2003. He won that election by a landslide, in part because he intimidated and arrested his opponents. Kagame was long celebrated by the international community for his role in ending the genocide, but his political career since then has taxed the patience of many admirers.
Many Hutus fled the country after the genocide ended, fearing retaliation. Although most eventually returned to Rwanda, the Hutu exodus poured manpower into several militant groups, setting the stage for conflicts like the one in the DRC.
In 1998, the government of France launched an inquiry into the assassination that kicked off the genocide, prodded by relatives of French crew members who died aboard President Habyarimana’s plane. A French judge accused Tutsi rebels, not Hutus, of launching the missile that destroyed the aircraft, and issued arrest warrants for several suspects close to Paul Kagame.
Kagame’s government denounced the inquiry as a politically-driven witch hunt and claimed France still supported the Hutus. The investigation caused tense relations between France and Rwanda until the charges were dropped in December 2018 over a lack of evidence. Kagame’s government insisted all along that the missile launched in 1994 was fired from a military camp controlled by Hutu forces.
