Analytical Reasoning: Genocide in Rwanda Part 1

Analytical Reasoning: Genocide in Rwanda

Dr. Helen ChukwumaDr. Sakinah Abdur-Rashied

Dr. Shakira Cain

Genocide in Rwanda

Is This Right?

Objectives:

• Students will have a clear understanding of genocide.

• Students will be able to recognize the origins and causes of genocide.

• Analyze the implication of genocide globally.• To understand the intervention and role of the

United Nations in genocide.• To appreciate lessons learned from genocide in

terms of human dignity, the rule of law, and tolerance

Day 1

• Class Activity: Pretest, Definition and discussion of genocide.

• Why genocide originated: Colonialism, Nativism, Ethnic cleansing, Religious intolerance, Racism, and Economics

• Examples of historical origins of genocide: Nazi, Biafra, Sudan, Liberia, and Rwanda.

• Assignment: research genocide in Rwanda

Pretest

• What is genocide?• Where can it occur?• Who does it involve?• Name a people who has suffered genocide.

Day 2

• Origins of genocide in Rwanda: How did it begin?

Day 2

• Analytical Reasoning: The Rwanda Genocide. 1994.• Preamble.• Day 2. The Origins of Rwanda Genocide.• Rwanda is a land-locked country in Central Africa with a

population of 7.3 million.(Show Map.) Their language is Rwanda but they also speak English, French and Swahili. They were colonized by Belgium before they gained their independence in 1962.There are three ethnic groups in Rwanda:

• a) The Hutus who are approximately 85% of the population• b) The Tutsis who are approximately 14% of the population• c) The Twa who are approximately 1% of the population.

Continued

• The conflict of citizenship and indigeneity was really between the Hutus and the Tutsis.

• Causes of Genocide:Colonialism by Belgium• Racism and Indigeneity • Privileged Citizenship• The Plane Crash that killed President

Habyarimana• Search for Justice as an Act of Revenge,

Retribution and Ethnic Cleansing.

Continued

• Colonialism:• Class test (Take Home) a) What is Colonialism?

Identify three countries that were former colonies in the continents of Africa, Asia and the Americas.

• b)Who are the Hutus and the Tutsis?

Continued

• Colonialism severed the socio-cultural links that bound the Rwandan people as an entity. The Belgian political rulers in a bid to maintain a power strong-hold on the country, introduced a deep racial divide between the Hutus and the Tutsis. They identified the Hutus as of the Bantu race and ancestry and so were indigenes and owners of the land while the Tutsis were a Hamitic race who migrated from Ethiopia so were aliens. The colonialists using racial difference favored the Tutsis who were thus associated with privilege and power. Colonial divisiveness was thus the initial cause of conflict and rivalry between two hitherto ethnicities who co-habited before the advent of the colonialists.

Continued

• Racism and Indigeneity:• The country in the Belgian Reform of the thirties had

three levels of population: the natives/indigenes or the Hutus, the aliens or the Tutsis and the settlers or the Belgian colonists. Such a divide led to civil strife so that when the Belgians left, issues of race and indigeneity rendered governance difficult. There were massacres but not genocide. Some Tutsis fled to Uganda a neighboring country and there formed the RPF Rwanda Patriotic Front led by Mr.Kagame and continued the struggle for a full and participatory citizenship.

Continued

• Privileged Citizenship:• The privileged citizenship of the Hutu over the

Tutsi helped to ignite the Revolution of 1959 whose aftermath caused dis-affection and unrest in the polity.

• The Plane Crash that killed the Hutu President Habiyarimana:

Continued

• On April 6th1994, the plane carrying President Habiyarimana and other dignitaries was shot down. The crash was blamed on the Tutsi leader Mr.Kagame then in exile in Uganda. Mr. Kegame denied the charge. The Hutu population still held Kegame and the Tutsis accountable.

• Search for Justice as an Act of Revenge, Retribution and Ethnic Cleansing:

Continued

• Class Discussion:• Do you consider the genocidal impulse an

admissible form of settling political disputes? In other words,Discuss whether the quest for power and control justifies genocide and man’s inhumanity to man. Give reasons for your answer.

• .

Day 3

• Movie: Hotel Rwanda• Class Activities: Discussion

Day 4

• Intervention of the United Nations• What is the UN, it’s purpose, what did it do,

and what could it have done during the Rwandan genocide?

• Student Activity - Three panels will be formed to brainstorm possible actions that could have been taken by the United Nations

continuedWhat is the UN, and what is its purpose.• The United Nations is an international organization founded in

1945 by 51 countries. The Organization can take action on a wide range of issues, and provides a forum for its 192 Member States to express their views, through the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council and other bodies and committees.

• The purpose of the UN is to maintain international peace and security, to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to peace.

• To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian nature.

Continued• In March of 1998, President Clinton issued the "Clinton apology."

"We come here today partly in recognition of the fact that we in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred" in Rwanda.

• This implied that the United States had done a good deal but not quite enough. In reality the United States did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda. It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide.

Continued

• Three of the five permanent members of the UN had reasons not to prevent the genocide. The US had nothing to gain, and France and China were supplying the government with arms.Most other countries had no investments or anything to gain from helping Rwanda, so little was done.

• And even as, an average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term "genocide," for fear of being obliged to act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing to "try to limit what occurred." Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective.

Day 5

• Rwanda and Genocide: What are the statistics, and the cultural implications?

Rwandan Genocide

Who was murdered? Who were the murders?

During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, ID cards were death warrants for many Tutsis.

—Jerry Fowler/USHMM

Continued

• The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass murder of an estimated 800,000 people. Over the course of approximately 100 days from the assassination of Juvenal Habyarimana on April 6 through mid-July, at least 800,000 people were killed, according to a Human Rights Watch estimate. Other estimates of the death toll have ranged between 500,000 and 1,000,000 (a commonly quoted figure is 800,000) or as much as 20% of the country's total population.

Who was murdered? Who were the murders

• The assassination of Habyarimana in April 1994 was the proximate cause of the mass killings of Tutsis and pro-peace Hutus. The mass killings were carried out primarily by two Hutu militias associated with political parties: the Interahamwe and the Impuzamugambi. The genocide was directed by a Hutu power group known as the Akazu. The mass killing also marked the end of the peace agreement meant to end the war, and the Tutsi RPF restarted their offensive, eventually defeating the army and seizing control of the country.

The Murders• Numerous elite Hutu politicians have been found guilty

for the organization of the genocide. The Rwandan Military and Hutu militia groups, notably the Interahamwe, systematically set out to murder all the Tutsis they could capture, irrespective of their age or sex, as well as the political moderates. Hutu civilians were forced to participate in the killings or be shot and were instructed to kill their Tutsi neighbors. Most nations evacuated their nationals from Kigali and abandoned their embassies in the initial stages of the violence.

Women Killers and Child Accomplices

• By September 1995, several hundred of the 10,000 inmates in Kilgali’s central prison were women. Rakiya Omar of the African rights told an Associated Press journalist that some “were actively involved, killing with machetes and guns” while others “acted in support roles allowing murder squads access to hospitals and homes, cheering on male killers, stripping the dead and looting their houses.”

Women Killers and Child Accomplices

• Women killed a few, but mainly waited for Tutsi women crossing the river with a kid on the back, so they would take the kid and throw it in the water.

• Reference: McDowell, “342 Women Implicated in Genocide.”

Aftermath

Approximately two million Hutus, participants in the genocide, and the bystanders, with anticipation of Tutsi retaliation, fled from Rwanda, to Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, and for the most part Zaire. Thousands of them died in epidemics of diseases common to the squalor of refugee camps, such as cholera and dysentery. The United States staged the Operation Support Hope airlift from July to September 1994 to stabilize the situation in the camps.

Day 6

• Truth and reconciliation as a global paradigm for post-genocide RwandaTruth and Reconciliation Committee.

• Truth and Reconciliation Committee.( Please see what I wrote in Day 6) This is a continuation.

• In July,1994, the RPF captured Kigali the capital of Rwanda and the Tutsis took over government. Two million Hutus fled to the Republic of the Congo for fear of retaliation. The threat of war and reprisals haunted both the Tutsi-led government and the fugitive Hutu. How can lasting peace be achieved?