#kigali

The Rwandan Genocide and the Warnings the World Chose Not to Hear

Between the evening of April 6, 1994, and the middle of July, the small Central African country of Rwanda was the site of one of the swiftest and most concentrated mass killings in human history. In about a hundred days, organised militias, soldiers, and ordinary citizens murdered something on the order of 800,000 people — most estimates run between half a million and a million — the overwhelming majority of them Tutsi, killed for belonging to a group that colonial rulers had hardened, decades earlier, into a racial category stamped on an identity card. The killing was not the explosion of ancient, spontaneous hatred that early coverage suggested. It was prepared: there were arms caches and trained militias, lists of names, and a radio station that read those names on air and urged listeners to 'cut down the tall trees' and exterminate the 'cockroaches' among them. Neighbours killed neighbours with machetes; churches and schools where Tutsi gathered for safety became the sites of the largest massacres. And all of it happened in plain view of an international community that had a peacekeeping force on the ground, had been warned months in advance that an extermination was being planned, and chose — at the United Nations, in Washington, in Paris, in Brussels — not to reinforce that force but to withdraw it, and not to use the one word, 'genocide,' that would have obliged the world to act. This article sets out what happened in those hundred days: how the genocide was built, how it unfolded, how the world looked away, and how a country has tried, in the thirty years since, to live with the memory and to render some account of it. It is not a mystery in the usual sense. The facts are known and the perpetrators were named. The harder question it leaves is the one about everyone who watched.