April 6, 1994: Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana is killed; the Rwandan genocide begins.
On the evening of April 6, 1994, an airplane carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down over the capital of Kigali, killing all on board. Habyarimana’s sudden death set off a campaign of violence, organized by a circle of political elites - a violence that first targeted Hutu moderates, and that devolved into frenzied bloodshed enacted along ethnic lines; it was a violence that stretched beyond its initial outburst into May, June, and July and came to be understood as genocide. Within one hundred days, the Hutu-led government and state-supported militias and paramilitary forces (often not even organized units but simply civilians armed with machetes and makeshift weapons) slaughtered some 800,000 Rwandans, mostly Tutsi people, and in total some 15-20% of the total Rwandan population.
At the time of Habyarimana’s death, the Arusha Peace Agreement between the Rwandan government and Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front had put in place a temporary ceasefire between the factions. An opaque and very often meaningless racialist understanding of the Hutu majority and Tutsi minority had crystallized under German and later Belgian colonial rule between 1897 to 1959, during which colonial administrators entrenched the Tutsi elite as a kind of intermediary privileged class between the Europeans and the Hutu subaltern. Conceived by Europeans as a Hamitic peoples - still African, yet culturally superior to sub-Saharan “Negro” races such as the Hutu, Tutsis ruled Rwanda until a period of ethnic violence in 1959-1963, which saw both the removal of Belgian colonial authority and the Tutsi government, and presaged in miniature the violence to come.
Government-issued identity cards, which listed their owners’ ethnicities, enabled the targeted killing of Tutsi individuals; Hutu civilians were encouraged based on propagandistic rhetoric of past grievances and threatened ethnic livelihood to turn against their neighbors - state-sponsored radio broadcasts, for example, which characterized the Tutsi population as an existential threat to a democratic Hutu republic. The West’s responses were heavily criticized during and to an even greater extent in the horrific aftermath of the hundred days of genocide: in particular the role of the French in lending its “unconditional” support to the regime right until the onset of violence; of the United States in its inaction; of the United Nations peacekeeping presence already in Rwanda at the time, and its swift abandonment of Rwandans under siege. The genocide ended in July, when the Rwandan Patriotic Front defeated state military forces. The impact of this relatively short period of violence, which decimated the country’s infrastructure and whole parts of its population, continues to resound in present-day Rwanda both in the material destruction it wrought and in its incalculable, indescribable trauma.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) twenty years on