The Genocide
the attack on the president
April 6, 1994. It's a Wednesday, and the streets of Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, are filled with red earth and pungent pebbles. Someone, from a shop, a house, or a building not far from the palace of the then President Juvenal Habyarimana, radical leader of the Hutu Power genocide front and the Interahamwe militias, turns on the radio. Frequency: Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), the station known for making hate propaganda against the Tutsi people. "The time has come!" the loudspeaker shouts, "Cut the tall trees. Crush those cockroaches. Crush all those Inyezi!"
The moment is the crash of a surface-to-air missile against the President's Mystere Falcon plane, with Burundi's Cyprien Ntaryamira, both Hutu, on board. The "tall trees", the "cockroaches" (or "Inyezi" in the local language), are the members of the Tutsi population."It was those cockroaches!" shout the wholehamwe in the streets, “they killed our President!". Habyarimana's wife, Agathe, aware of the facts, is immediately taken to France.It is the beginning of the carnage, of one of the fiercest genocides in the history of mankind. What Kofi Annan called “a shame for humanity”.
GENOCIDE
For 104 days there were massacres and barbarism of all kinds; nearly a million people were massacred in a planned and widespread manner.The massacre took place not only through bombs or machine guns, but also with machetes. On 8 April the genocide began to spread outside Kigali, telephone lines were cut and the number of people killed began increasing. The following day, the FPR left its bases in the north and attacked Byumba and Ruhengeri. The Interahamwe and the Presidential Guard led the massacre in Gikondo as it began the evacuation of foreign nationals by sending troops to Kigali by France with Operation Amaryllis and Belgium with Operation Silverback to evacuate national residents and Westerners. Unlike the French soldiers, the Belgian soldiers also evacuated some Tutsi.
Threatened Tutsi were abandoned to their fate, including personnel of the French embassy and cultural services. The same treatment had also been reserved for moderate and Hutus in general to all supporters of a national conciliation policy: some sources estimate that around 20% of the victims of the genocide were Hutu. The first were, in fact, the most important exponents of the democratic parties, the journalists and the members of associations defending human rights, without distinction of ethnicity. As the days went by the strategy changed and the civilian population looking for escape was lured to gathering places with the false promise of protection on the part of local authorities, but in these places (schools, churches held until then inviolable shrines and other public places) found deadly traps, places of scary massacres.
The massacre did not take place with bombs or machine guns, but mainly with the most rudimentary but equally effective machete. The Tutsi genocide ended in July 1994 with the RPF's victory in its clash against government forces. After getting the control over the whole country, the RPF implemented a justice program against those responsible for the genocide which further aggravated the humanitarian situation, as it resulted in the escape of about a million Hutu refugees mixed with Hutu extremists towards neighboring countries Burundi, Zaire, Tanzania and Uganda for fear of being executed.