The Miracle of Forgiveness: The Rwandan Genocide, Thirty Years Later
by Jonathon Van Maren, European Conservative:
Rwandans stunned the world with the magnitude of genocidal horror; now they do so by the magnitude of their mercy.
Thirty years ago, on 7 April 1994, the Rwandan genocide began. Over the course of 100 days between April and July, armed Hutu militia members murdered 70% of the Tutsi minority—roughly 20% of the Rwandan population. An accurate number of the victims is difficult to determine, but somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 people were butchered, most with machetes or rifles. In May, while the genocide was still underway and Tutsis were being systemically hunted down in fields, forests, and homes, the cover of Time magazine featured a single quote from a local missionary: “There are no devils left in Hell. They are all in Rwanda.”
The catalyst for the massacres came on April 6, when a plane carrying Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down outside the Rwandan capital of Kigali. Habyarimana, a former military officer, had seized power in a 1973 coup and established a dictatorship. Hutus constituted the majority ethnic group at nearly 85% of the population; Tutsis were 14%. The previous year, Habyarimana had signed a peace deal to end the Rwandan Civil War, launched in 1990 by the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front. Details of who ordered his assassination remain hotly contested, but his death left a power vacuum that was immediately filled by the extremist Hutu power movement.
Hutu extremists moved with stunning speed, calling on militias across the country to kill the Tutsi “cockroaches” and launching a bloody purge in the capital to eliminate the multi-ethnic moderate political Rwandan establishment. The prime minister, protected by an escort of Belgian soldiers, attempted to address the nation on Radio Rwanda; soldiers overwhelmed them and killed the prime minister, her husband, and later, the Belgians. That night, moderates including the president of the Constitutional Court, the minister of agriculture, and the leader of the Parti Liberal were among the dozens of assassinations.
By noon on April 7, the moderate political establishment had been decimated. By then, militias across the country had taken up the broadcasted calls to genocide, and the killings were underway in earnest. Increasingly frantic reports from journalists, UN workers, and other foreign observers on the ground warned the world of what was underway almost from the beginning. Within four weeks, the Red Cross was reporting death tolls of up to 200,000 and stated that it was impossible to keep count. Infamously, not a single country intervened.
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