Friday, June 8, 2007

What was the result of the Rwandan Genocide?

Beginning on April 6, 1994, for one hundred days, approximately 800,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutu militia using weapons other than fire arms such as machetes and simple home made clubs. In the climax of the fighting between the two major Rwandan tribes, the killing reached almost 10,000 per day.
Hundreds of thousands of Tutsis had been killed between April 6th to April 21st. the rate of killing and the level of danger to non-Hutus was cause for the U.N. to abandon Rwanda. All foreign troops were pulled out of Rwanda and left the Hutus and Tutsis to handle the escalating problem. The Hutu militia was now free from the danger of U.N. troops and they were also free to escalate their extermination of the Tutsis. They took control of the radio stations in Rwanda and played constant hate propaganda against the Tutsis. The stations encouraged all Hutu members to check all people they met for identity cards and if they were Tutsi, they should kill them. The country was a hell-on-earth for a Tutsi because anyone could just kill you for no apparent reason. old friends, or neighbors would just kill the other for his wife, or land. Tutsis tried to use sanctuary as a defense against annihilation but the Hutu militia would just lock the doors and burn the church down. They even attacked hospitals for the wounded Tutsis. in one case, at Musha, 1,200 Tutsis took refuge but around 8 in the morning, Hutu found them, and killed them all. the massacre and carnage was over in almost 12 hours. that was one of the worst single massacres.
In small villages, militiamen forced Hutus to kill their Tutsi neighbors or face a death for them and their families. They also forced Tutsis to kill members of their own families.
By May, approximately 500,000 Tutsis had been massacred for one reason; they weren't Hutu. Tutsi bodies were seen commonly floating, bloated and undignified, down the Kigara River into Lake Victoria.
The massacring only ended after thousands of armed Tutsi rebels that had fled, invading from surrounding countries, managed to defeat the Hutus and halt the genocide in July 1994. But by then, more than one-tenth of the population, about 800,000 Tutsi people, had been killed.

1 comment:

Tommy D said...

is that all the results? How many people actually DID the killing?