AI Index: AFR 47/001/2013
On the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, the international community must continue its efforts to improve its response to mass atrocities.
Between April and July 1994, around 800,000 Rwandan Tutsi and Hutu opposed to the government were killed in a major human catastrophe of the 20th century. Many others were tortured, including women and girls subjected to rape and other forms of sexual abuse.
The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), predominantly formed of Tutsi, launched a war from Uganda in 1990 posing a military and political challenge to the then government. Tutsi had themselves fled to Uganda to escape previous waves of violence and repression in Rwanda. As the war started, the authorities called on its supporters to help government forces fight the enemy: anyone identified as a supporter or potential supporter of the RPF. This became a deliberate strategy to kill Tutsi by the then government who manipulated the question of ethnicity in order to maintain power.
On 6 April 1994, a plane carrying the Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, and the Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira, was shot down over Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, triggering ethnic killings on an unprecedented scale. National radio, including Radio Rwanda and Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, helped communicate messages of ethnic hatred and incited Hutu to kill. Official plans conceived by government to eliminate Tutsi, and Hutu opposed to the authorities, were carried out with unquestioning and brutal efficiency. The government provided training and distributed arms including machetes to its supporters from the former ruling party, the National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development (MRND), its youth wing, the interahamwe (‘those who attack together’), its ally, the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic (CDR) and its youth wing.