Rwanda - Causes of the conflict Questionbank

Source A

Scott Straus, a professor of political science, interviewing a former supporter of Hutu extremists who had also confessed to killing civilians, in the collection of accounts Intimate Enemy. Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide (2006).

[President] Habyarimana was the parent of Rwanda. Habyarimana did nothing bad to Tutsis … No person in Rwanda thought “I am Hutu. You are Tutsi.” Habyarimana prevented all that. We intermarried. All that was disturbed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) war … We, the peasants, believed that the person who had killed the president was an enemy … they were Tutsis, so we believed the solution was to kill the Tutsi… We said we were defending ourselves against the enemy… All the things that happened in Rwanda were caused by the war between the RPF and the Rwandan government, and the people who are dead and the things that were destroyed, it was the RPF and the government in place that must answer for that.

Source B Photograph of Rwandan government soldiers atop a tank fleeing with civilians from advancing RPF forces (17 July 1994).

Source C

Linda Melvern, a British journalist, writing in the book Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide (2004).

The United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) Commander Dallaire met the Rwandan government, hoping to obtain permission to evacuate refugees in Kigali, [but] the government did not seem to be concerned by the horrendous ethnic killing. On 23 April, Dallaire travelled to see the RPF leader Kagame … The RPF was disappointed that the “international community” had not stated its disgust with the violent destruction of the opposition political parties and the total survival of the government and its leaders. Dallaire and Colonel Bagosora [Hutu extremist leader] then met on 28 April … Bagosora told Dallaire that the RPF was intending to conquer the whole country. His side had never refused to share power with the RPF. It was all the fault of the RPF for refusing to negotiate with the government … The swift military success of the RPF in the country created an atmosphere of fear among the [government’s] army … Some officers were planning to massacre all the people in Kigali who were sheltering in hotels and churches, the vast majority of them Tutsi … On 28 April, Oxfam [an international charity] issued a press release stating that the pattern of systematic killing of the Tutsi amounted to genocide … But another story now dominated the headlines: with thousands of people from eastern Rwanda fleeing the RPF advance, this was the fastest exodus [mass movement] of people the world had seen.

Source D

André Guichaoua, a professor of sociology, writing in the academic book From War to Genocide. Criminal Politics in Rwanda, 1990–1994 (2017).

[Even the] Rwandan government’s … most eager defenders doubted that the war against the RPF could be won … If defeat at the hands of the RPF could not be avoided, none of [the] Tutsi … should be left to profit from their victory … Their primary objective was to exterminate the potential political base for the RPF and its allies … From 12 April onward, government politicians linked their political futures to a conclusion of the war through genocide and the elimination of Tutsi … For its part, the RPF’s repeated refusals to negotiate fell in line with the government’s murderous strategy. When the RPF finally agreed to engage in discussions between 22 April and 14 May 1994, it refused to negotiate with the government’s representative. But there was no longer anything for the two sides to negotiate, the RPF did not want to hear anything more about a ceasefire. This is exactly what Dallaire confirmed in his message to the UN on 24 April, which summarized his conversation with Paul Kagame: “He did not appear interested in a ceasefire. His forces were winning the war and were going to continue fighting as long as they were winning.”

Source A

P. Gourevitch. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (1998).

In the province of Kibungo, in eastern Rwanda, in the swamp and pastureland near the Tanzanian border, there’s a rocky hill called Nyarubuye with a church where many Tutsis were slaughtered in mid-April of 1994. A year after the killing I went to Nyarubuye with two Canadian military officers. We were in a United Nations helicopter, traveling low over the hills in the morning mists, with the banana trees like green starbursts dense over the slopes. The uncut grass blew back as we dropped into the centre of the parish schoolyard. A lone soldier materialized with his Kalashnikov, and shook our hands with stiff, shy formality. The Canadians presented the paperwork for our visit, and I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom. At least fty mostly decomposed cadavers covered the oor, wadded in clothing, their belongings strewn about and smashed. Macheted skulls had rolled here and there. The dead looked like pictures of the dead. They did not smell. They did not buzz with ies. They had been killed thirteen months earlier, and they hadn’t been moved. I had never been among the dead before. What to do? Look? Yes. I wanted to see them, I suppose; I had come to see them – the dead had been left unburied at Nyarubuye for memorial purposes – and there they were, so intimately exposed. I didn’t need to see them. I already knew, and believed, what had happened in Rwanda. … at Nyarubuye, and at thousands of other sites in this tiny country, on the same days of a few months in 1994, hundreds of thousands of Hutus had worked as killers in regular shifts. There was always the next victim, and the next. What sustained them, beyond the frenzy of the first attack, through the plain physical exhaustion and mess of it? … The killers were killed all day at Nyarubuye. At night they cut the Achilles tendons of survivors and went off to feast behind the church, roasting cattle looted from their victims in big res, and drinking beer. (Bottled beer, banana beer … Rwandans may not drink more beer than other Africans, but they drink prodigious quantities of it around the clock.) And, in the morning, still drunk after whatever sleep they could and beneath the cries of their prey, the killers at Nyarubuye went back and killed again. Day after day, minute to minute, Tutsi by Tutsi: all across Rwanda, they worked like that.

Source B

Photograph of the corpses of Tutsi that litter the floor of a classroom at Nyarabuyu church, Rwanda, 1994.

Source C

“Heart of Rwanda’s Darkness: Slaughter at a rural church”, an article by Donatella Lorch, published in The New York Times on 3 June 1994.

The banner across the entrance to the red brick church here announces the celebration of a festival. A poster of Pope John Paul II is tacked on the main door and above it is a large white statue of Jesus, his arms beckoning. Inside are the remains of victims of a mass slaughter carried out by Government-trained militiamen in mid-April. In what they had hoped would be a refuge from the deadly irrationality of tribal and political violence, more than 500 members of the Tutsi tribe found their way to the church compound only to be shot or hacked to death by Hutu soldiers in classrooms, bathrooms and courtyards, and then left to rot. It appears that they were methodically hunted down,first in the church, then in the school and nally in the workshops near the soccer field. Residents say that probably 1,000 more were killed and buried in mass graves in the town, which is just inside the border with Tanzania. A frenzy of killing was evident at the rear of the compound. There, eight rooms are led with hundreds of corpses, shoulder to shoulder, and piled onto one another. One hundred more killed in a courtyard are now half skeletons, their esh in shreds. There are so many that it is impossible to walk through without treading on them. More corpses are hidden in the tall grass. “It took them two days to kill everyone in the church,” said Consolata Mukatwagirimana, 27, a Tutsi whose family was killed at home and who like the rest of the townspeople has been led to a camp 50 miles away. She accompanied reporters to the church. This village, now under control of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the rebel group led by the minority Tutsi tribe, appears typical of many devastated by regular Army troops or militiamen of the majority Hutu tribe in the early days of the two-month old civil war. The buildings are empty, the livestock is gone. Only corpses and the sound of the wind remain.

Source D

Flora Mukampore, a survivor from the massacre at Nyarubuye recalls what happened to her. She knew one of the killers personally.

Gitera was there. Imagine someone leaving their home and knowing their victim, knowing their names and the names of their 88 1 children. They all went there and killed their neighbours, their wives and their children. All the people they were cutting fell on me because I was near the door. My hair was all washed with blood. My body was drenched in blood and it was starting to dry on me, so the killers thought I’d been cut all over, they thought I was dead. I lay down on one side with only one eye open. I could hear a man come towards me and I guess he saw me breathe. He hit me on my head saying: “Is this thing still alive?” Immediately I heard my entire body say “whaaagh”. Something in my head changed forever. Everything stopped. When the wind blew and the cold passed through my body I woke up and went into the building but I didn’t realise that there were bodies around me. I didn’t remember what had happened. I just thought they were normal people and so I just slept among them like we had slept together before the killers came. Can you imagine living with the dead. At some point god helped me and made me unconscious because if I hadn’t been, I think I would have killed myself. But I was unconscious, and anyway killing yourself needs energy.

Source A

Wreckage of President Habyarimana's aircraft

Source B

Government of Rwanda, Committee of Experts, 2010. Extract from the Mutzini Report following the investigation of the 6 April 1994 crash of President Habyarimana’s Dassault Falcon 50 Aircraft

According to Sean Moorhouse, a British Army captain, the UNAMIR (II) team concluded that: “the Rwandan president’s airplane had been shot down by three Whites with the help of the Presidential Guard and that the shots from weapons which brought down the airplane were red from the Kanombe military camp.”

Source C

Taken from an article from the Global Researcher by Barrie Collins published in August 2008.

A former member of Paul Kagame's rebels, Aloys Ruyenzi told French judge Jean Louis Bruguiere in 2004 that he was in the room when Kagame gave the order to shoot down the president’s plane, and gave the names of all those who were present. The meeting took place between 2.00 p.m. and 3.00 p.m. on 31 March, 1994.

Source E

F.Reyntjens. Working paper "A Fake inquiry on a Major Event: Analysis of the Mutsinzi Report on the 6th April 1994 attack on the Rwandan President's aeroplane" (2010). University of Antwerp, Institute of Development Policy and Management The envirans of the airport and Masoke Hill in April, 1994

Google map dated 2008

Source F

F. Keane. Season of Blood: A Rwandan journey, pages 27–28 (1996).

The Arusha Accords were to be his death warrant. The extremists he had cultivated and the men who had grown rich during the days of the one-party state were not about to see their privilege disappear with the stroke of a pen. Now, instead of holding fast, Habyarimana was weakening, threatening to pull the house down around them. It was time to install a more reliable man. On the evening of 6th April as Habyarimana was returning from a session of negotiations at Arusha, two missiles were red at his jet as it landed in Kigali International Airport. The most likely explanation – one disputed by Hutu extremists and their French supporters – is that soldiers of the presidential guard based next to the airport red the missiles. There is another theory that members of the French military or security services, or mercenaries in the pay of France, shot down the aircraft. Although no proof has been produced, there are senior gures in the Belgian security services who think that the French may have wanted rid of Habyarimana, believing he was about to hand the country over to the RPF. The jet crashed close to the airport. Habyarimana was killed, along with the president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, and the chief of staff of Rwanda’s army, Deogratias Nsabimana. The MRND government immediately blamed the RPF – and by extension, all Tutsis – for the killing, suggesting somehow that RPF soldiers had managed to locate themselves next to the biggest army base in the country and murder the president. It was possible, of course, but highly improbable... The murder of the president would provide the perfect pretext for implementing the final solution to the Tutsi problem.

Source G

L. Melvern. Conspiracy to Murder: the Rwandan genocide, pages 263–64 (2004).

There is also another explanation, and this one was rst reported in Brussels by the Africa Editor of Le Sir, the journalist Colette Braeckman. Some weeks after the crash, in mid-June 1994, Braeckman reported in her newspaper that she had received a letter from someone calling himself “Thadee”, who claimed to be a militia leader in Kigali. He told her that two members of the French Detachement d’Assistance Militaire et Instruction (DAMI), had launched the missiles on behalf of the CDR party. Only four members of the CDR were involved. Those who red the missiles had worn Belgian army uniforms stolen from the hotel Le Meridien. They were spotted leaving Masaka hill by members of the Presidential Guard. The missiles had been portable, probably SAMs, originally from the Soviet Union. Braeckman reported that during the three days after the missile attack some 3,000 people living in the Masaka area were murdered.