From April 7, 1994 to July 1994, a 100-day period, members of the Hutu majority government conducted a genocidal attack against members of the Tutsi tribe. The catalyst for this attack is said to have been the April 6, 1994, shooting down of an airplane carrying the Rwandan president at the time, Juvénal Habyarimana, as well as the Hutu president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira. Everyone on board was killed and the Tutsi were blamed for this attack.

Members of the Rwandan army, who were mostly Hutus, passed out clubs and machetes to fellow Hutu civilians to execute Tutsis on sight. If they showed mercy, they could potentially be arrested for being collaborators. This turned into despicable mass killings. Many instances saw men killing wives and churches becoming places for mass murders. Members of the clergy would sometimes arrange for people to attend churches, where they would subsequently be executed. By the time it was all said and done, nearly a million people had been killed, most of them Tutsis, based on their ethnicity. That's about 1 in 5 Rwandans. Reportedly, 100,000 Hutus were also killed, some of them as a result of revenge killings by the Tutsis and some by Hutu extremists. The genocide reportedly ended after Tutsi rebels overtook the government.¹

Why the hate, though?

How did it get to the point where your affiliation to an ethnic group led to your death? What caused the ethnic divide? A lot of it can be traced back to colonialism. Germany initially colonized present-day Rwanda and Burundi in the late nineteenth century, and with their colonization, they instituted a feudal system, which is a system of land ownership and duties. You could ascend from one group to another based on your economic situation. In the system, the Tutsi minority usually ended up on top. After World War I, the League of Nations (the precursor to the United Nations) basically gave Rwanda and Burundi to Belgium.

Belgium instituted policies that forced citizens of Rwanda and Burundi to carry cards that displayed their ethnicity. French became the common language and Christianity became the national religion. There were approximately 80% Hutus, 19% Tutsis, and 1% Twa.² Despite this majority status, Hutus were still seen as inferior to the colonizers. They were refused access to higher education, politics, and administrative jobs. The system was a form of apartheid, which was also practiced in South Africa. There is some dispute about how the Hutus and Tutsis were differentiated. Belgians were said to have differentiated between them by height, nose size, skin color, and eye type. Tutsis were said to have a more European look because of their light skin, height, thin nose, and lips. Hutus, on the other hand, have darker skin and shorter builds.³ However, many Rwandans don't believe that there are distinguishable physical characteristics between the two groups.

Regardless of this, there is one thing that cannot be denied, and that is that this division based on ethnic groups was a direct result of colonization. During colonization, “Hutus” were people who farmed crops, while “Tutsis” were people who tended livestock. These differences in class became differences in ethnic groups.

Classic divide and rule, instituted by both the Germans and Belgians.

Such was the climate during the genocide. After decades of programmed hate and division, the assassination of the Hutu president made it easy to spread propaganda messages of hate that the Tutsis were coming after the Hutus.

How would Rwanda recover post-genocide?

How would reconstruction and reconciliation work in such a climate?

How would survivors come face to face with perpetrators?

What about the pain, trauma, hatred, the quest for revenge, forgiveness?

How would all these work?

As you can imagine, the implications on a political, legal, economical, and cultural level were monumental.

Reconciliation started with seeking justice through the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, local courts, and national courts. Opportunities were provided for reconciliation and healing as victims of the genocide were granted the chance to learn the truth about what had happened to their loved ones and families, while perpetrators had the chance to confess to their crimes, ask for forgiveness, and show remorse. Many perpetrators also had to work for forgiveness by building houses for survivors. This must have been an incredibly difficult process, and I cannot even imagine what it felt like to come face to face with the people who had murdered your loved ones. I get chills just thinking about it, but there was no sweeping the issues under the rug. There was no denying the magnitude of the effects. Some people forgave and some didn't, but the opportunity was presented.

According to Search for Common Ground, which is an organization that partners with people around the world to ignite shared solutions to destructive conflicts by working at all levels of society to build sustainable peace through three main avenues (dialogue, media, and community), Rwanda has made great strides post-genocide. It has seen impressive economic growth and a concerted effort from national and international actors to heal wounds and rebuild communities. This process is hailed as a modern-day success story in post-genocide reconciliation and development.⁴

It certainly hasn't been perfect, though, as Rwanda is ruled by an authoritarian government headed by President Paul Kagame, who has been the president since 2000. He has been criticized in the past for his human rights record and state-sponsored media and style of governance. That being said, Kagame came into power with two main goals: to unify people and to reduce poverty, and there have been efforts made to achieve these goals. I already discussed the efforts to reconcile. For the economic part, Kagame created an advisory team that sought advice from emerging nations like China, Thailand, and Singapore. It was part of his national program, called Vision 2020, whose intention is to make Rwanda a middle-income country by 2020. It included clear, specific goals that could be quantified, including reconstruction, infrastructure, and improving multiple sectors of the government and economy. As of the time of writing this book, it does not quite look like Rwanda will be a middle-economy country by 2020,⁵ but it has a gender-balanced cabinet with 50% of its members women, met over half of the goals it set out to achieve in the Vision 2020 plan,⁶ and has gone from being one of 10 poorest nations in the world to one of the fastest-growing economies.

There is still a lot of work to be done, but what I hope this case study shows is the importance of reconciliation and creating a path for healing.