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By Root 2021 0

diluted as a result of the Arusha agreement. They began training their militias, importing weapons, and preparing to exterminate Tutsi. Rwandan Hutu fears of Tutsi grew out of the long history of Tutsi domination of Hutu, the various Tutsi-led invasions of Rwanda, and Tutsi mass killings of Hutu and murder of individual Hutu political leaders in neighboring Burundi. Those Hutu fears increased in 1993, when extremist Tutsi army officers in Burundi murdered Burundi’s Hutu president, provoking killings of Burundi Tutsi by Hutu, provoking in turn more extensive killings of Burundi Hutu by Tutsi.

Matters came to a head on the evening of April 6, 1994, when the Rwandan presidential jet plane, carrying Rwanda’s President Habyarimana and also (as a last-minute passenger) Burundi’s new provisional president back from a meeting in Tanzania, was shot down by two missiles as it came in to land at the airport of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, killing everyone on board. The missiles were fired from immediately outside the airport perimeter. It remains uncertain to this day by whom or why Habyarimana’s plane was shot down; several groups had alternative motives for killing him. Whoever were the perpetrators, Hutu extremists within an hour of the plane’s downing began carrying out plans evidently already prepared in detail to kill the Hutu prime minister and other moderate or at least less extreme members of the democratic opposition, and Tutsi. Once Hutu opposition had been eliminated, the extremists took over the government and radio and set out to exterminate Rwanda’s Tutsi, who still numbered about a million even after all the previous killings and escapes into exile.

The lead in the killings was initially taken by Hutu army extremists, using guns. They soon turned to efficiently organizing Hutu civilians, distributing weapons, setting up roadblocks, killing Tutsi identified at the roadblocks, broadcasting radio appeals to every Hutu to kill every “cockroach” (as Tutsi were termed), urging Tutsi to gather supposedly for protection at safe places where they could then be killed, and tracking down surviving Tutsi. When international protests against the killings eventually began to surface, the government and radio changed the tone of their propaganda, from exhortations to kill cockroaches to urging Rwandans to practice self-defense and to protect themselves against Rwanda’s common enemies. Moderate Hutu government officials who tried to prevent killings were intimidated, bypassed, replaced, or killed. The largest massacres, each of hundreds or thousands of Tutsi at one site, took place when Tutsi took refuge in churches, schools, hospitals, government offices, or those other supposed safe places and were then surrounded and hacked or burned to death. The genocide involved large-scale Hutu civilian participation, though it is debated whether as many as one-third or just some lesser proportion of Hutu civilians joined in killing Tutsi. After the army’s initial killings with guns in each area, subsequent killings used low-tech means, mainly machetes or else clubs studded with nails. The killings involved much savagery, including chopping off arms and legs of intended victims, chopping breasts off women, throwing children down into wells, and widespread rape.

While the killings were organized by the extremist Hutu government and largely carried out by Hutu civilians, institutions and outsiders from whom one might have expected better behavior played an important permissive role. In particular, numerous leaders of Rwanda’s Catholic Church either failed to protect Tutsi or else actively assembled them and turned them over to killers. The United Nations already had a small peacekeeping force in Rwanda, which it proceeded to order to retreat; the French government sent a peacekeeping force, which sided with the genocidal Hutu government and against invading rebels; and the United States government declined to intervene. In explanation of these policies, the U.N., French government, and U.S. government all referred to “chaos,” “a confusing situation,