Rwandan Genocide

For hundreds of years, Rwanda’s Hutu and Tutsi groups had lived in relative harmony. But the arrival of European colonists enforced and exaggerated the differences between them, until, from the mid-twentieth century, resentment began to boil over. By 1994, the two groups were sworn enemies. Over 100 days, violence engulfed the country, as members of the Hutu majority worked systematically to exterminate the Tutsi. Spurred on by government and military officials, neighbour turned against neighbour, friend against friend, until hundreds of thousands lay dead. But what precipitated this senseless mass killing? Why were so many ordinary people willing to participate? And what responsibility does the international community bear for the bloodshed? This is a Short History Of the Rwandan Genocide. A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. With thanks to Allan C. Stam, Professor of Public Policy and Politics at the University of Virginia. Written by Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow | Produced by Kate Simants | Production Assistant: Chris McDonald | Exec produced by Katrina Hughes | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design by Oliver Sanders | Assembly edit by Anisha Deva | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw | Fact Check by Sean Coleman Get every episode of Short History Of… a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to shows across the Noiser podcast network. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions ⁠A Short History of Ancient Rome⁠ - the debut book from the Noiser Network is out now! Discover the epic rise and fall of Rome like never before. Pick up your copy now at your local bookstore or visit ⁠⁠noiser.com/books⁠⁠ to learn more. Take back your personal data with Incogni! Use code shorthistory at the link below and get 60% off annual plans: https://incogni.com/shorthistory Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  This episode contains content that some may find distressing.

• 1:32Speaker 00

  It's late September 2006.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  In a small village in Rwanda's eastern province, the day dawns bright and humid.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  A woman pulls open the creaking wooden door of her small house and steps out into the sticky heat.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  As she follows a familiar dusty path through the village, a group of giggling schoolchildren rush past and one of her neighbors calls a greeting. She raises her hand in acknowledgement, but does not stop. She has no time to linger and chat today.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  The dirt road is fringed with lush green trees, home to a dazzling array of bird species, their raucous cacophony singing into the vivid blue sky.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  Soon, she comes to the wooden pens that house her two dairy cows, her main source of income, especially since the death of her husband.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Usually, the milking is the first job of the day, but today, her daughter is doing it in her place. She calls out to thank her, then continues towards the village center.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  In the main square, a long table has been set out in the shade, with six elders already sitting behind it, sporting distinctive green, yellow, and blue striped sashes. This is a gachacha court, and these people, the judges, who will determine the fate of the accused due to stand trial today. Rows of straight-backed wooden chairs stand before them, already filled with many of the woman's neighbors. She sits down beside an older villager in a vibrant lime-green dress and matching headwrap, who gives her a small smile and squeezes her hand. Today is going to be difficult for them all.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  Now, the chatter of the crowd immediately dies down as a young man in a brown shirt is brought to stand before the chief judge. Some members of the crowd jeer, shouting insults at the man until the chairman calls for quiet. In a booming voice, he lays out the crimes of which the man stands accused: the murder of four people during the 1994 genocide.

• 3:51Speaker 00

  The defendant hangs his head as the judge calls for the first witness.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  One by one, villagers testified to the violent acts he committed. An old man claims he saw him wielding a bloody machete and entering the church. Someone sobs as they ask him why he killed their son.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  Soon it is the woman's turn to stand. Though her hands shake, her voice is firm as she asks him the questions that have tormented her for years. Did he kill her husband? And where is his body?

• 4:28Speaker 00

  The man looks straight at her. He did not kill her husband, he tells her. But he did watch his body being thrown into the mass grave on the edge of town.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  Abruptly, the woman sits down. She barely hears as the judge pronounces the man's sentence, and he is led away. All she can focus on is the ever-present bird song ringing out into the clear blue sky.

• 4:55Speaker 00

  For much of the rest of the world, the Rwandan genocide might be disappearing into history. But for her, the horror will never fade.

• 5:12Speaker 00

  For hundreds of years, Rwanda's Hutu and Tutsi groups had lived in relative harmony. But the arrival of European colonists enforced and exaggerated the differences between them, until, from the mid-20th century, resentment began to boil over.

• 5:30Speaker 00

  By 1994, the two groups were sworn enemies. Over 100 days, violence engulfed the country, as members of the Hutu majority worked systematically to exterminate the Tutsi.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Spurred on by government and military officials, neighbor turned against neighbor, friend against friend, until hundreds of thousands lay dead.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  But what precipitated this senseless mass killing? Why were so many ordinary people willing to participate?

• 6:06Speaker 00

  And what responsibility does the international community bear for the bloodshed?

• 6:12Speaker 00

  I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is A Short History of the Rwandan Genocide.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  The twisted roots of the Rwandan genocide lie in the country's colonial past.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  Before 1858, this small, landlocked country in East Africa was unknown to Europeans. Although exact patterns of migration and settlement into the region are still debated, for several centuries, it has been home to three groups: the Twa, the Hutu, and the Tutsi.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  The Tutsi, with their large herds of cattle, gained economic and political power and found a monarchy in what is now the territorial heart of Rwanda.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  Alan C. Stam is professor of public policy and politics at the University of Virginia.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  The Hutu and the Twa, they're agriculturalists. They don't have a particularly hierarchical or feudal-based society. Some 400 years ago, groups of cattle herders, pastoralists, arrived from what today we would think of as Somalia. Over the next couple of hundred years, those people, what we would call the Tutsi, they developed something that the Europeans, who arrived in the 1800s, recognized as a relatively modern feudal society.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  By the 19th century, the labels of Hutu and Tutsi have more to do with class position than ethnic or tribal identity. The Hutu are farmers, and Tutsi are herders. Though both groups speak the same language, Kinyarwanda. They share a belief system and cultural practices, including ancestor worship. And there is frequent intermarriage and movement between the two groups.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Their identities are somewhat fluid. If you shift your employment, your identity shifts as well. Now, we don't know for sure how much shifting back and forth there is, but it's certainly taking place. Anytime a Hutu would become a property owner, would begin to own cattle, they would essentially assist. ...immolate into the Tutsi identity, the Tutsi class. So these identities of Hutu and Tutsi are more class-based at this point than what we would think of today as rigid ethnic identities. And so there's also mobility the other way. You can go from being Tutsi into becoming a Hutu if you become a banana farmer.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  This fluidity is upset in the late 19th century, during the period that becomes known as the scramble for Africa.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  At the 1884 Berlin Conference, the continent is carved up between avaricious European nations, many of whose representatives have never set foot on the continent. The geographic area that includes modern-day Rwanda is assigned to German control. And in 1890, the country is formally incorporated into German East Africa.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  In the Tutsi monarchy and upper classes, the Germans see a way to govern the country remotely. Then, during the chaos of the First World War, Belgium invades Rwanda in 1916. They retain control over the territory after the end of the conflict. And for the Tutsi elites, cooperation with these new colonial powers maintains their social position.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  The Europeans, and it doesn't really matter who they are, essentially just take over. At the top is indigenous, sort of feudal, monarchy-based system. And there's a king, Rabugiri, who essentially is kept in charge. And then there's a patronage paid to the Europeans. And so essentially, instead of having to overthrow and crush the entire system, all the Europeans have to do is co-opt it.

• 10:21Speaker 00

  During the period of colonial rule, Hutu and Tutsi are transformed from markers of socioeconomic status into ethnic labels. Under the influence of race-science ideologies, colonial administrators and missionaries see the upper-class Tutsi as necessarily racially superior to the agrarian Hutu. In 1931, the Belgians introduce identity cards, marking Rwandans with an indelible ethnicity for the first time.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  The effect of this was that it essentially locks in place the ethnic identities of Hutu and Tutsi. Now, the impact of that is that, over time, within the Hutu, we start to have landowners. We start to have business owners. We start to have people who previously would have been assimilated into the monarchist class, or what in England people would think of as the upper class, the upper class is. Well, now, ethnic identity and class identity essentially become very rigid. And this is the beginning of creating all kinds of really serious identity-based problems.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  The crystallization of what was once a more fluid class system will have dramatic and deadly consequences in the years to come.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  After the Second World War, the newly formed United Nations decrees that Belgium must begin preparing the country's path to independence. But this is complicated by the now inflexible divide between Hutu and Tutsi.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  So we have these rigid ethnic identities. We have a political system that previously had allowed for the assimilation of new elites into this upper class. Well, now that's not possible anymore. And so we start to see demands for greater political representation, greater redistribution around. And here's where it gets really ugly. Because these ethnic identities are locked in place through the colonial ethnic identity systems, the demands are ethnic-based.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  By the 1950s, Rwanda's population is almost 90% Hutu and 10% Tutsi, with the Itwa making up less than 1%. But for the Hutu majority, self-governance means not just liberation from European control, but the overthrow of the Tutsi upper class and all who support them.

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• 14:49Speaker 00

  As the country prepares for independence, separate Hutu and Tutsi political parties form. In 1957, Hutu politicians and academics lay out their vision for the country's future.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  A group of Hutu intellectual leaders issue what becomes known as the Hutu Manifesto. And this is explicitly modeled after Marx's Communist Manifesto, after the American Declaration of Independence, all of these essentially precursors of colonial or class-based systems, saying the underclass, the colonies, saying, "We're done, and we want democracy."

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Two years later, on the 1st of November, 1959, the Hutu Revolution begins.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  It is sparked by the public beating of Hutu politician and district mayor Dominique Mabony Matwa, by a member of the Tutsi political group. Soon, reprisal attacks on the Tutsi begin. Between 1959 and 1961, as many as 20,000 Tutsi are killed.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  The Belgians had intended to stall Rwandan independence for as long as possible, to protect their economic interests in the country. But in the face of large-scale public unrest, they now declare the support for democratic majority rule and abandon the absolutist Tutsi monarchy.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  Elections are soon held, and the result is unsurprising. Hutu parties win 83% of the vote, and a provisional government is established under Mabony Matwa.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  A year later, a referendum sees 80% of Rwandans voting for the abolition of the monarchy. The last king flees the country with thousands of his supporters. And in the face of increasing violence, many ordinary Tutsi civilians also seek refuge in neighboring countries. The majority head north into Uganda.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  But if anyone hopes the ethnic tensions will dissipate when Rwanda is finally granted independence on the 1st of July 1962, they will be sorely disappointed.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Militant Tutsi refugees soon begin conducting attacks on Rwanda. They are seeking a right to return to the country of their birth and for Tutsi governance over this new nation. The Hutu-dominated Rwandan government responds by forming militias to indiscriminately arrest or kill any Tutsi remaining in the country. In 1963 alone, some 10,000 Tutsi civilians are massacred and tens of thousands more seek refuge in neighboring countries. It is a vicious cycle that will repeat in the decades to come.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  The Rwandan government remains Hutu-dominated in the decades after independence. Quotas are put in place to minimize Tutsi influence in educational institutions and governmental bodies, and large-scale massacres occur in 1967 and 1973. The latter is also the year that President Habir Yarimana comes to power in a military coup, promising to end the corruption of the previous regime. But he will soon operate as a dictator, hoarding power for himself and among his trusted circle and banning all other parties.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  In 1979, a military organization is formed among Tutsi refugees in Uganda, which will later take the name of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, or RPF. But fearful of their growing power, Uganda's president Museveni soon turns against them.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Late 80s, he says to the RPF leadership, "You gotta go. I'm kicking you out." So, we get the first sort of modern-era invasion from Uganda into Rwanda in 88, 89. The Hutu army manages to push back this Rwanda Patriotic Front invasion. The RPF continues to arm, continues to train. Fast forward to the early 1990s, and now Museveni's like, "No, you have to leave or I'm gonna destroy you." So, they invade again. They carve out an area in northern Rwanda that becomes essentially RPF-controlled territory.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  This second incursion by the RPF in 1990 becomes known as the Rwandan Civil War. As the RPF take control of the north of the country, some 600,000 civilians are displaced internally by the fighting.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Among Hutu elites, the development prompts a hardening against ordinary Tutsi, who become seen as an internal threat. In December 1990, the Kangura newspaper publishes what it calls "The Hutu Ten Commandments", which condemns any Hutu collaboration with Tutsi people. And the propaganda against the Tutsi minority only intensifies as the fighting continues.

• 19:59Speaker 00

  After a ceasefire is negotiated in 1991, peace talks between the Habir Yamana government and the RPF, led by a man named Paul Kagame, begin the following July. The next year, peace accords are signed in Arusha, Tanzania.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  In 1993, the United Nations says, "All right, here's what we're going to do. We're going to restore a democratic system. In the meantime, what we're going to do is we will give the RPF five out of 21 government ministries. The Rwandan National Army will be roughly 20% RPF, 80% Hutu. And so it's going to be a power-sharing agreement. And then, the deal is, in two years, we'll have elections."

• 20:50Speaker 00

  But by now, Habir Yamana is fighting on multiple fronts: externally, against the RPF rebels, and internally, against both moderate Hutu opposition seeking democracy and Hutu radicals who oppose the power-sharing agreement.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  Only days after the peace accords are signed, the radio station RTLM begins broadcasting Hutu supremacy content, including virulent anti-Tutsi propaganda. Hardliner army officials start organizing, training, and arming thousands of Hutu youth militias, supposedly for self-defense in the event of another civil war.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  The reason for the foundation of such militias soon comes to light. Since the signing of the Arusha Accords, a UN peacekeeping force comprised of soldiers from Belgium, Bangladesh, Ghana, and Tunisia has been stationed in Kigali, Rwanda's capital. An informant now tells the commander, Romeo Delaire, that target lists of Tutsi and political moderates are being drawn up by extremists in the government and army. He estimates that 1,000 Tutsi in Kigali could be found and killed in just 20 minutes.

• 22:08Speaker 00

  It seems that Hutu supremacists have decided the only way to ensure the peace and safety of the country is to eliminate the RPF, and possibly, all Tutsi. Later, those accused of genocide will testify that the plan was intended as a deterrent against a feared incursion from the RPF stationed in territory they control in northern Rwanda.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  And so, the Hutu essentially develop a plan where we tell the Tutsi, “If you invade, we’ll kill everybody.” And that becomes the plan for the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. So the Hutu develop this, under a guy named Bagasora, the Hutu plan essentially has two parts. One, they’re going to target the leadership class of the Tutsi identity group. At the same time, they’re going to solve their problem, once and for all, so the other part of the plan is to kill all the Tutsi.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  It’s not only the Hutu extremists who are making plans. The RPF has signed the peace accords and, in theory, is preparing for power sharing and future elections. But later, testimony suggests that the leadership is concerned that in a country where nearly 90% of the population is Hutu, Tutsi parties will never be voted in, even when free and fair elections are held. Power may well have to be taken by force.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  So, from the Tutsi perspective, they say to themselves, “Well, we have this window of opportunity. We have a little bit less than two years to completely restore ourselves to power.”

• 23:46Speaker 00

  By the beginning of 1994, the stage is set for extreme violence. Rwanda is a tinderbox awaiting a spark.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  It is late evening, on the 6th of April 1994, at Konombi Military Camp at the edge of Kigali.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  An off-duty soldier with the Rwandan National Army stands outside his barracks, enjoying the last faltering rays of sunlight as dusk steals in around him.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  He digs around in his pocket for a packet of cigarettes. Striking a match, he lights up and breathes in deeply, enjoying the relative quiet after a busy day.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  Soon, the faint sounds of city traffic are interrupted by the distinctive roar of a plane. Not just any plane, but President Habi Yarimana's jet.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  The man scans the darkening sky until he spots the aircraft's lights.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  It is circling low as it comes into land at the nearby Kigali Airport. Idly watching its descent, he takes another drag on his cigarette. But now, the plane's wing is hit by some kind of projectile.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  As the soldier stands frozen, a fireball blossoms towards the back of the aircraft. The air is rent by the screech of tearing metal.

• 25:17Speaker 00

  Within moments, the entire plane is engulfed in flames. Shouts echo around him as soldiers emerge from various buildings to stand in the parade ground. Every eye is trained on the fiery wreckage tumbling through the twilight sky, falling inexorably towards the presidential palace a few streets away.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  Suddenly realizing what this means, the soldier comes to his senses and runs over to his barracks. He slams open the door and hurtles up the stairs into his dormitory. He grabs his green uniform from his wardrobe and as he hops about getting the trousers on, he shouts to his bewildered comrades to do the same. Questions about what has happened come at him thick and fast from all corners of the room. Zipping the fly and jamming his berry onto his head, he turns to face them. "The president's plane has been shot down," he announces. "Everyone needs to get dressed and armed now."

• 26:16Speaker 00

  Suddenly a bugle sounds, the call to action, and the room bursts into life. Panicked men dragging uniforms out of cupboards. The soldier allows himself a grim smile of satisfaction before heading to the armory. They have to be ready for whatever may be coming.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  Among the passengers of the downed plane are not only President Habia Ramana, but also the President of Burundi and several officials from the Ministry of Defence. When the first soldiers arrive at the scene of the crash inside the grounds of the Presidential Palace, it is immediately clear that there are no survivors.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  What is less certain is who launched the two surface-to-air missiles that brought the aircraft down. Two possible perpetrators are identified. Either the RPF or Hutu hardliners launching a coup against a president they see as too moderate.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Now, question becomes obviously who shot it down? The evidence today, best evidence, points to the RPF, under the orders of Paul Kagame. How do we know this? A former member of the RPF flipped sides and testified against the RPF at the ICTR. Unsurprisingly, Paul Kagame and his people in Rwanda today say, "No, no, no. It was essentially a coup within the Hutu, which there's precedent for."

• 27:49Speaker 00

  Even now, three decades on, blame cannot be conclusively assigned. What is incontrovertible is what happens next.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  Hutu supremacists, the same figures who'd been spreading anti-Hutu propaganda by radio and in the newspapers, quickly work to seize control of the government. They then initiate the first part of the genocide plan. The killing of everyone on the target lists. Predominantly elite Hutu and moderate Hutu politicians. They first order the Presidential Guard to kill the moderate Hutu Prime Minister, Agathe Uwilingi Yamana, the first woman ever to hold this post. Early in the morning of April the 7th, she and her husband are murdered, along with the 10 UN peacekeepers from Belgium who'd been sent to protect her.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Shortly afterwards, Colonel Bagasora, a hardliner in the Ministry of Defence, and perhaps the chief architect of the genocide plan, sends a press release informing the population that the army is now in charge. The situation escalates as elite military units work their way through the lists.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  The assassination of the president then triggers beginnings of the killings. What happens then? So, first week of April, the first thing we see is the killings off of the name lists that had been put together previously. The RPF then, saying "we're gonna save all these people," invades from northern Rwanda.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  The RPF launched their offensive from their northern stronghold on the 8th of April, as militia members and soldiers in Kigali begin killing Tutsi civilians in the street. The reasons why the RPF invaded at this moment are still murky. Perhaps it is to try and prevent a genocide that they know is coming, as Paul Kagame claims. Or perhaps the chaos represents an opportunity for the RPF that Kagame cannot ignore, regardless of the cost that might be paid by the Tutsi population.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  He knows that while this plan is going on, there will be just total chaos, and they'll be able to take over control of the country.

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• 31:34Speaker 00

  In the face of the escalating crisis in Kigali, the response of the international community is to withdraw from Rwanda. Having lost 10 of its peacekeepers defending the prime minister, Belgium recalls all of its soldiers. France, which since independence has been the European country with the greatest economic stake in the country, begins evacuating Hutu allies and French citizens. Within a few days of the presidential assassination, the United Nations has dramatically reduced the number of peacekeeping troops stationed in the country to a token force of just a few hundred, despite Dalles' objections.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  Nobody wants to do anything about it because it seems very dangerous. Now, we know President Clinton, who afterwards, he claims, "Had I known, I would have done something." Communications were broken off. We had no way of knowing. Well, it turns out, we know that President Clinton knew very early on, before the genocide begins, that the risk of genocide was high. And then, in the first two weeks of April, we know that he knew on a daily basis exactly what was going on.

• 32:40Speaker 00

  The international community is well aware that mass killings in Kigali have begun. Thanks to the informant who spoke to Dalles in January, they also know that a plan for widespread genocide exists. And yet, in April 1994, the United Nations and the leaders of the world's most powerful countries abandoned the Tutsi of Rwanda to their fate.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  Soon, the killings move from targeted attacks on named individuals to the indiscriminate murder of all Tutsi. Military commanders begin calling on Hutu across the country to attack Tutsi everywhere. Anti-Tutsi propaganda continues to be pumped out over the airwaves through radio station RTLM, which in the year since has been nicknamed "Radio Genocide."

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Figuring out how important the radio effects were is very difficult. Anecdotally, it seems pretty important. The broadcasts themselves are horrific. I mean, there's a DJ on the radio telling people, "Here's tonight's news, and by the way, go out and kill your neighbors."

• 33:51Speaker 00

  On RTLM, the Tutsis are referred to frequently as "cockroaches." In mid-April, the broadcasts begin calling for a final war to exterminate them all. By the 14th of April, violence against the Tutsi is widespread throughout Rwanda. Within the span of another week, a systematic program of genocide has become the norm in almost every region of the country. As with atrocities committed in more recent years, women and children are targeted at the same rate as men. This is not an attack on potential RPF combatants. It is a campaign to wipe the Tutsi off the face of the earth. Many of these attacks are carried out by the Hutu militias that were trained and armed

• 34:36Speaker 00

  in the months leading up to April 1994. Prominent among these are groups known as the "Interahamwe," meaning "those who attack together." Chillingly, they often target people seeking shelter in churches and other community spaces.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  We have mass killing at community centers. A majority of those types of killings are carried out by the Interahamwe. During previous purges, coups, episodes of mass violence, community centers, churches, and monasteries had been safe places. If you were a Tutsi, if you were a Hutu, if you got to one of these community places, got inside, you were safe. Well, part of the plan of the genocide in 1994 was, "We're going to take control of the national radio system. We're going to encourage people to go to these community centers, and then we're going to kill everybody in the community centers." Dozens upon dozens of these centers around the entire country,

• 35:37Speaker 02

  everyone inside is killed, regardless of identity. They just kill everybody.

• 35:45Speaker 00

  But it's not only the militias that carry out the campaign of extermination. Neighbor turns against neighbor, and tens of thousands of civilians also take part in the atrocities. Groups comprising both militia members and ordinary people go house to house in the local area, hunting down Tutsi. The killings are often low-tech and intimate, involving machetes and blunt objects. Some victims are drowned or herded into buildings that are set alight.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  Roadblocks also play a crucial role in finding and murdering fleeing Tutsi.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  A lot of people get killed at these roadblocks at night. One of the exacerbating factors is a lot of the people at these roadblocks that are manning or staffing the roadblocks, they're teenagers, teenage males, and they're drunk. They've been given huge jerry cans of banana beer to get them through the night, to help them stay awake. And so what happens is, Tutsi, Hutu, whatever, they're hiding during the day, and they're moving at night, and then they come upon one of these roadblocks. Now, a roadblock sounds very formal, but it could just be a bamboo pole across the road to stop people, and the road is, you know, the road may be a trail. And if you can't produce your identification, if you can't convince these drunk 13 to 17-year-olds who they are,

• 37:07Speaker 02

  they'll simply hack you to death.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  It is a slaughter of such immense proportions that even the natural world is affected. Witnesses speak of black clouds of birds of prey, vultures and buzzards, an aerial map of the massacre sites as they gather to feast on corpses. By the end of April, the Nyabong River is choked with bodies, and tens of thousands of dead bodies are carried into Lake Victoria, Africa's largest lake.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Later, when asked to reflect on their motivations, Rwandans who took part in the massacres will provide different reasons for their actions. In some cases, ordinary Hutu civilians claim they were cajoled, coerced, or forced into participating by intra-Humweh members, or soldiers, or just by their peers.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  So there's people that want to essentially defect from this, just as is in the case with the Holocaust. There are individuals that say, "I don't want to participate in this." Now, during the Holocaust, and these police battalions, if somebody didn't want to participate, for the most part, they were allowed to just walk away, turn their back on what was going on. They were probably ridiculed for it, but they weren't killed. In the Rwandan case, in many of these circumstances, if you didn't participate in the killing, you would be considered complicit and you'd be hacked up too, which increases the odds that people will participate.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Perhaps, more disturbingly, a huge number take part willingly. They were motivated by personal grievances or the chance to gain economically by looting of the homes of the murdered. A majority had bought into the dehumanizing anti-Tutsi propaganda. They described the Tutsi as historic oppressors of the Hutu and saw them as an existential threat to the safety and peace of the nation.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  A lot of ordinary people participate in this. I think the best comparison case is in Germany. The killing of the Jews in World War II starts with virulent, violent antisemitism in the 1930s. Well, that virulent, violent antisemitism, sort of leading up to and culminating in Kristallnacht, requires the participation of lots of ordinary Germans. So the idea that ordinary people wouldn't participate in this kind of violence, there's more than adequate precedent for it, particularly in the German case.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  Hutu gangs do more than just kill the people they consider their enemy. They loot their homes, torture living people, and mutilate corpses. And Tutsi women, as well as Hutu women with Tutsi husbands, are systematically subjected to sexual violence.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  We have horrific sexual violence that's used to intimidate women, to find out where families are, to punish women, literally tens of thousands of mass rapes.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  In many cases perpetrators deliberately infect the Tutsi women they assault with HIV. According to a UN report, rape is the rule and its absence the exception, with over a quarter of a million women falling victim to the crime.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  In the aftermath of the genocide, between 2,000 and 5,000 children are born as a result of these attacks.

• 40:34Speaker 00

  But amidst the horror, there are glimmers of hope.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  It is the middle of May 1994 in a small community called Rubona Hill. This high up, the air is chilly, especially after the warmth of the sun has gone. At a roadblock set up on the main road into the village, a man named Ezekiel Cambanda yawns loudly and rubs his eyes. It is well past nightfall, and he will not see his bed before dawn.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  Ezekiel and four other men have been guarding this stretch of road for hours. It is not an elaborate roadblock, and the headlamps of the car that they have pulled horizontally across the path to impede anyone wishing to enter or leave the village.

• 41:22Speaker 00

  Now Ezekiel's attention is drawn to the thick forest that lines the path.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Something rustles in the undergrowth.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  Signaling to one of the men guarding the roadblock with him, they head towards the noise, straining to see anything in the inky blackness. Suddenly, a woman stumbles out of the trees and throws herself on the ground before them, sobbing.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  Ezekiel can see she has a deep gash across one shoulder, crusted with dark blood. Crying, she pleads for her life. She tells him she has lost her papers and begs him to let her disappear back into the forest. But Ezekiel shakes his head. She needs to come with him.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  Grabbing her arm, he hauls her to her feet, telling his companion that he's taking her into the village. The man nods and makes his way back to the roadblock.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  As they walk, the woman's sobs escalate. But Ezekiel whispers to her to be quiet. They're not going to kill her. He is taking her to the local priest, who will keep her safe.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  Soon they reach the village's church, and Ezekiel wraps smartly on its warped wooden door. It creaks open, just a crack.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  When the priest sees them, he sinks with relief, quickly opening up to hurry the woman inside, promising her a meal and a bed for the night. Ezekiel thanks him before heading back to the road.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  But as he approaches his team, he hears raised voices and hastens his step. A military jeep comes into view. It is parked in front of the roadblock, engine idling, while a soldier talks to the villagers manning it. Ezekiel calls out a greeting and asks what is going on.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  The soldier, stern and serious, tells him there are reports of Tutsi fleeing this way. They want to come into the village to search for them.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  As he speaks, his hand rests idly on the machete thrust into his belt. In the light from their headlamps, Ezekiel can see the blade is stained red.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  With "forced calm", Ezekiel explains that they have set up the roadblock for this very reason: to catch and kill any Tutsi who try to escape this way. He promises that he and his men are ready. There's no need for the soldiers to waste their time searching the village.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  Breaking out in a sweat despite the cool evening, Ezekiel waits for the soldiers' response. Until finally, he nods. Thanking them for their vigilance, he gets back into the Jeep and drives away.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  When they are at last out of sight, Ezekiel lets out the breath he has been holding. Their plan: to save as many Tutsi as possible, remains a secret. They are safe... for now.

• 44:41Speaker 04

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• 45:12Speaker 01

  From the creators of Zootopia and Frozen comes Disney's Hext. Welcome to Hext and enter the world of witches, where it was foretold that an ordinary girl would become an extraordinary witch and save the world of magic. Disney's Hext arrives in theaters this Thanksgiving.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  A few individuals and organizations do what they can to save people during the genocide. Some schools and churches also hide Tutsi fleeing the violence. At the Asantara Saint-Antoine Orphanage, the priests in charge take in huge numbers. By the time soldiers come to find the Tutsi children who have evaded them, the priests have falsified the records to make it look like every child present had been living at the orphanage prior to April the 6th. Their actions represent the few bright spots amongst the carnage of the genocide.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  Against the backdrop of the mass murder, the RPF fight through Rwanda from the territory they hold in the north. As they advance, they commit a huge number of killings too, adding to the chaos.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  A lot of people die as a result of Tutsi-RPF retribution as they fight their way through the country. There's a lot of ethnically oriented retribution violence at the local level.

• 46:36Speaker 00

  In June, the French military finally decide to intervene in Rwanda.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  The French begin what's known as Operation Turquoise, Blue Hats. And so the French begin essentially an invasion of Rwanda coming out of the Congo. The RPF realizes, oh gosh, the French through Operation Turquoise are going to take over most of the country. The RPF accelerates. And so essentially, we see this race between the RPF trying to take control of much of the country as possible and the French expeditionary forces doing the same thing. And the first week of July, they meet, and that's the end of the war.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  One hundred days of atrocities come to an end on the 18th of July, when the RPF take control of the entirety of Rwanda.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  The Hutu government and military officials orchestrating the genocide flee the country. The next day, a Hutu member of the RPF, named Pastor Bzimungu, is sworn in as president. RPF commander Paul Kagame is named vice president and minister of defense.

• 47:43Speaker 00

  Once the dust is settled, the dead can finally be counted. The best estimates suggest the number is somewhere between half a million and 800,000, or 75% of Rwanda's Tutsi population. It is possible that up to 30% of the country's Twa population are also among the murdered.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  Though they bring peace of a kind, RPF control of Rwanda is not welcomed by all. In the aftermath of the genocide, more than 2 million flee to refugee camps in neighboring countries. Although some of the refugees had taken part in the killing, a large number simply fear reprisal attacks against all Hutu.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  But though foreign aid is mobilized, the lack of infrastructure for such huge numbers at such short notice leads to outbreaks of disease. Soon cholera alone is taking hundreds of lives per week, and overall, 50,000 will die in these camps.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  And the violence is far from over. Just as the exiled RPF had done in previous years, armed Hutu groups form in Zaire, what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, and launch attacks on Rwanda, leading to more conflict and immense regional instability. Back in Rwanda, the social fabric of the country has been torn apart by the genocide. A process of reconciliation is required.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  There are also hundreds of thousands of citizens who stand accused of genocide, from those who killed their neighbors to those who planned and orchestrated the atrocities on a national level. Justice must be served, and it takes two forms.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  The very serious genocidaires are tried, convicted, and imprisoned by the United Nations through the ICTR, the precursor to the International Criminal Court. The lower-level genocidaires, basically the people that actually carried out these plans, they're tried, convicted, and incarcerated inside Rwanda.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  The ICTR, or International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, is formed in November 1994. Its tenure includes some landmark achievements in global legal history, including the first conviction for the use of sexual violence as a war crime. In December 2008, Colonel Bagasora is finally convicted for his central role in organizing the genocide.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  When the court closes, it has tried 93 suspects and convicted 62. But the majority of suspected perpetrators are tried within Rwanda in revived, pre-colonial, local tribunals known as gachacha, or grass courts, which are brought back in 2001. As well as convicting and sentencing perpetrators, these courts play a vital community role as forums for gathering information on victims and grave sites. They allow relatives and survivors to speak publicly about the horrors they experienced and provide a space for discussion and reconciliation within communities.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Over the course of a decade, they handle around 1.9 million cases. Though they cannot impose the death penalty, they can hand out life sentences.

• 51:04Speaker 00

  Former RPF leader Paul Kagame becomes president of Rwanda in 2000. Under his leadership, various measures are taken at a national level to bring about reconciliation. The flag and national anthem, both associated with Hutu nationalism, are changed. A new constitution is promulgated in 2003, and the country is reorganized into five large, multi-ethnic provinces. From this point on, the official line is that Hutu and Tutsi as legal identities cease to exist. The only ethnic group is Banyarwanda, to which all Rwandans now belong.

• 51:47Speaker 00

  Nowadays, Rwanda's economy is stronger than many of its East African neighbours.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  The Kagame government, to their credit, have emphasised economic development and have been successful at it in ways that very few other African leaders have been.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  Yet Rwanda's stability comes in large part from the authoritarian nature of Kagame's rule. The country's elections are not considered free or fair by international observers, and he has been accused of arresting critics and political opponents, and even involvement in the extrajudicial killings of his rivals. The genocide continues to have impacts far beyond the borders of Rwanda as well.

• 52:28Speaker 00

  In the immediate aftermath of the atrocities, the international community received heavy criticism for its response. Its failures prompted the creation of the ICTR, which acted as a blueprint for the International Criminal Court, and catalyzed a movement to try to ensure such atrocities were never committed again.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  We see a movement within the United Nations to create what becomes known as R2P, the Responsibility to Protect. On the one hand, sovereignty grants great rights to the government and people of nation-states. At the same time, the governments running the nation-state have extraordinary responsibility to provide for the security and welfare of their residents. When the state becomes the source of insecurity, according to the R2P doctrine, the international community has the right and obligation to essentially violate norms of non-intervention.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  But such intervention requires a vote at the United Nations Security Council. And in recent years, conflict and division between powerful nations have meant that, once again, the international community struggles to respond to unfolding catastrophes.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  Even if it was willing to intervene in places like Sudan, Nigeria, Somalia today, you're never going to get the United States and Russia and China to agree to send United Nations peacekeepers. So I think there's a general sense of pessimism today about the feasibility of international intervention, that immediately following the Rwandan genocide and civil war, there'd been a period of hope where, no, actually, maybe we can do something.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  The Rwandan genocide remains one of the darkest periods in East Africa's post-colonial history. A horrific crime that tore communities apart. The wounds it left are slow to heal, even three decades on. Yet Rwanda does not shy away from the events of 1994. The genocide is remembered annually, in the belief that by facing and remembering the past, there is still hope for a different future.

• 54:54Speaker 00

  Next time on Short History, I will bring you a short history of the Falklands War.

• 55:01Speaker 05

  It was really quite a short war and quite a clear, good ending. And partly that was because for both sides, it was difficult to get people there. So it wasn't one of these conflicts where you can keep on pouring people in to continue the fight. You basically had to fight with what you had already taken with you. And that meant that the war came to a pretty natural conclusion.

• 55:26Speaker 00

  That's next time.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  If you can't wait a week until the next episode, you can listen to it right away by subscribing to Noiser+. Head to www.noiser.com/subscriptions for more information.

• 55:43Speaker 04

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot stop your new clients from emailing you at 3 a.m. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you be in three places at once. And while we can't help you organize your calendar, LinkedIn can help you land more clients so you have a calendar to organize. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at linkedin.com/smallbusiness.