Tales of Rwanda

On the 6th of April 1994, a plane carrying then Rwandan dictator Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down. This was the beginning of one of the worst crimes against humanity in modern times, a genocide that would decimate an ethnic group and tear a country apart.

 

In 1994, Rwanda’s 7 million strong population was divided into three ethnic groups, the Hutu were the largest at 85%, the Tutsi at 14%, and the Twa at 1%. The genocide was caused by ethnic tension led by the Hutu government who released propaganda linking the entire Tutsi ethnic group with the Tutsi majority rebel group the Rwandan Patriotic Front as well as reminding the Hutu of past oppression by the Tutsi people and placing the blame for the country’s social, economic, and political ills on the Tutsi.

 

With this, the regime turned the Hutu majority against the Tutsi minority and any Hutu or Twa who sympathised with the Tutsi or attempted to stop or hinder the genocide. The genocide led to the deaths of an estimated 75% of the Tutsi people and 30% of the Twa people.

 

Between the 6th of April and the 15th of July 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandan men, women and children were murdered by an estimated 200,000 perpetrators. This was not a meticulously organised genocide. Although it was calculated as a way for the Hutu led regime to remain in power the majority of the murderers were not trained soldiers working for them, they were the neighbours and acquaintances of the people they slaughtered.

 

 

 

This story is not one about statistics. It is all too easy to reduce this abhorrent crime to numbers. Maybe it makes it easier to understand the situation. Maybe it is the only way to grasp the idea that people can be so evil as to destroy each other in such a brutal and unthinkable way.

 

With Tales of Rwana: a family’s journey we will try to keep the discussion of genocide rooted firmly in the people who experienced it. We want to keep the focus on the people and not the statistics. This is not a story of the worst of humanity, this is the story of the best of humanity. It is a story of survival in the face of something almost incomprehensible, of people’s ability to continue with life and push on against the worst odds imaginable. This is the story of [family name here].