On April 6, 1994, at approximately 8:30 p.m. local time, a plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down, killing both presidents on board. Within minutes, the Rwandan army and militia, comprised of Hutu civilians, had set up roadblocks. They started stopping people and demanding to see their identity card, which identified each person's ethnic identity-Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa. And the killing of Tutsis began.
In the next 100 days, over 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered, their bodies thrown into rivers, clogging the waterways and washing up on the shores of Lake Victoria. The killings averaged 333 1/3 murders per hour, over 5 ½ per minute, which, according to experts, was five times the killing rate of the Nazis (Melvern, 4).
Comparisons to the Nazi regime are understandable. However, unlike Germany fifty years earlier, this genocide was not carried out by specially trained military personnel in remote areas of the country using industrial gas chambers and other specialized equipment; this genocide was carried out by thousands of civilians, Hutu farmers and doctors and pastors of churches, who killed and maimed their neighbors, wives, friends and children with machetes and hoes, agricultural tools, "in full and immediate view of the public" (Berry & Berry, 5), in broad daylight.
Less than four months later, the killings were over as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), an army made up of Tutsis and moderate Hutus, defeated the Rwandan military. The organizers of the genocide and members of the former government fled the country and the international community began to recognize its responsibility in the matter-too late. Not only had we failed to intervene during the systematic murder of almost a million people while we quibbled over whether to use the word "genocide" to describe what some people believed was a tribal conflict, but French troops had intervened on the side of the former government, protecting killers as they fled the advancing RPF. In fact, there had been plenty of evidence of Hutu intent leading up to April 6th, but nobody had been willing to step in, for whatever reason, and stop the escalation of hate radio and journalism or force the government to end its system of ethnic discrimination against Tutsis.
By August, 5 out of 6 children in Rwanda had witnessed violence, and the adult population probably has similar statistics to report (Gourevitch, 224). How does a society recover from that? Everyone in Rwanda knows somebody or is related to somebody who has been killed or is a killer. Everyone has a genocide story to tell. How does a society heal from those wounds? And how does a society recover from the fact that a tenth of its population was killed and the international community did nothing to help?
