Rwandan Genocide
The 1994 slaughter of around 800,000 Rwandans in 100 days, carried out largely by hand while the world watched and refused to use the word genocide.
In roughly 100 days between April and July 1994, about 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda, most of them Tutsi, most of them murdered by neighbors with machetes and clubs rather than by an army with modern weapons. The killing rate was faster than the Nazi death camps. A United Nations force was already in the country and was cut back while it happened. Rwanda is the case that international institutions cite when they explain why they exist, and the case that critics cite when they argue those institutions do not work.
The categories were manufactured
Hutu and Tutsi were not tribes with different languages or territories. They spoke the same language, practiced the same religions, and lived in the same villages, and the distinction had once been closer to a class marker that people could move across. Belgian colonial administrators hardened it: convinced by pseudo-scientific racial theory that the taller, cattle-owning Tutsi were a superior "Hamitic" caste from elsewhere, they ruled through them and, in 1933, issued identity cards that fixed every Rwandan as Hutu or Tutsi for life. Those cards were still being checked at roadblocks in 1994.
At independence the Belgians switched sides, and the Hutu revolution of 1959 to 1962 drove hundreds of thousands of Tutsi into exile. Their children formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front in Uganda and invaded in 1990. Three years of war ended in the Arusha Accords, a power-sharing deal that Hutu extremists in President Juvenal Habyarimana's circle had no intention of honoring.
The plan and the silence
It was organized in the open. Militias called the Interahamwe were trained and armed, lists of targets were drawn up, and the radio station RTLM spent months calling Tutsi inyenzi, cockroaches, and telling listeners to "cut the tall trees." In January 1994 the Canadian general commanding the UN mission, Romeo Dallaire, cabled New York that an informant had described the arms caches and the killing lists, and asked for permission to seize the weapons. He was told to stay within his mandate and inform the president.
On 6 April 1994 Habyarimana's plane was shot down over Kigali. Who fired is still disputed. Within hours the roadblocks were up. Ten Belgian peacekeepers were murdered on the first day, precisely because the planners knew what would follow: Belgium withdrew its contingent, and on 21 April the Security Council voted to cut the UN force from 2,500 to 270. Washington, burned by Somalia six months earlier and bound by a new directive on peacekeeping, instructed officials to avoid the word "genocide" because the word carried obligations. State Department spokespeople performed the contortion of conceding that "acts of genocide" had occurred. France, long the patron of the Habyarimana government, eventually launched a zone in the southwest that sheltered civilians and also let organizers of the killing escape.
What stopped the genocide was not intervention. It was the RPF, which fought its way across the country and took Kigali on 4 July.
The long aftermath
Around two million Hutu, including the defeated army and militias, fled into eastern Zaire, and the refugee camps became rear bases for a new war. Rwanda invaded twice, Mobutu fell, and the Congo wars that followed killed several million people. The single deadliest conflict since 1945 grew directly out of the 100 days.
Inside Rwanda, more than a million cases were processed through improvised community gacaca courts because the formal system could never have managed them. Paul Kagame has ruled ever since, delivering order, growth, and a state that does not tolerate opposition. Abroad, the guilt of 1994, joined to Srebrenica the following year, produced the Responsibility to Protect doctrine and a permanent question that no summit has answered: everybody now agrees the world should have acted, and nobody has explained who would have gone.