A Brief Intro about Rwanda.

Rwanda, formally known as the Republic of Rwanda, is a landlocked country in the Great Rift Valley, where the African Great Lakes area and East Africa join. Perhaps one of the smallest countries on the African territory, its capital city is Kigali. Located a couple of degrees south of the Equator, Rwanda Shares a border with the likes of Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is exceptionally high above sea levels, giving it the nickname “land of thousand hills”, with its geology overwhelmed by mountains in the west and savanna toward the east, with various lakes all through the country. The environment is mild to subtropical, with two stormy seasons and two dry seasons every year. Rwanda has a populace of over 12.6 million living on 26,338 km2 (10,169 sq mi) of land and is the most thickly populated terrain African country.

By the mid-1990s, Rwanda, a little country with an overwhelmingly agricultural economy, had one of the greatest population densities in Africa. Around 85% of its populace was Hutu; the rest were Tutsi, alongside a few Twa, a Pygmy bunch who were the first occupants of Rwanda.

The genesis of the problem started during the Colonial period, during which the Belgians supported the minority Tutsis over the Hutus, thereby increasing the bitterness of both ethnicities, which brought about the high level of violence even before Independence.

In 1959, there was a revolution by the Hutus which caused over 300,000 Tutsis to leave the country thereby reducing the Tutsi tribe.


By early 1961, The Tutsi king was deposed and a Hutu-dominated republic was created,

After a referendum by the United Nations that same year, Rwanda was formally granted independence by Belgium in July 1962.

Ethnically inspired violence continues to erupt soon after freedom. In 1973, the military-installed Major General Juvenal Habyarimana, a moderate Hutu, in power.

He was toppled following a coup in 1973, which brought President Juvénal Habyarimana to the number one position in the country.

President Juvénal Habyarimana ruled the country for over twenty years.

During the 1980s, a gathering of 500 Rwandan exiles in Uganda, led by Fred Rwigyema, who battled with the revolutionary National Resistance Army (NRA) in the Ugandan Bush War, which saw Yoweri Museveni oust Milton Obote.

These soldiers stayed in the Ugandan armed force following Museveni’s initiation as Ugandan president, yet all the while started arranging an invasion of Rwanda through an undercover organization inside the military’s ranks.

In October 1990, Rwigyema led a force of over 4,000 rebels from Uganda, proceeded into Rwanda under the flag of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), unfortunately, Rwigyema was killed on the third day of the attack, and France and Zaire rolled out soldiers in support of Rwandan armed force, allowing them to repel the invasion. Paul Kagame, Rwigyema’s deputy took control of the RPF forces, coordinating a strategic retreat through Uganda to the Virunga Mountains, a rough space of northern Rwanda. From there, he rearmed and revamped the military, and did raise money and enrollment from the Tutsi in the diaspora.

In 1990, forces of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), under the leadership of Paul Kagame restarted the war,

The RPF pursued a quick in and out style guerrilla war, catching some boundary regions, however not making critical gains against the Rwandan army.

In June 1992, following the development of a multiparty alliance government in Kigali, the RPF declared a truce and started dealings with the Rwandan government in Arusha, Tanzania.

In August 1993, President Habyarimana agreed to an arrangement at Arusha, Tanzania, requiring the creation of a joint government between the Rwanda government and the RPF.

This agreement didn’t go down well with Hutu extremists, which might before long take an evil decision to stop it.

On April 6, 1994, a plane conveying Habyarimana and Burundi’s President Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down bizarrely In the city of Kigali, leaving no survivors. (It has never been indisputably figured out who the offenders were. Some have accused Hutu radicals, while others accused heads of the RPF)

In less than 24 hours, the Presidential Guard, along with individuals from the Rwandan military (FAR) and Hutu militia army is known as the Interahamwe (“Those Who Attack Together”) and Impuzamugambi (“Those Who Have the Same Goal”), set up detours and blockades and started butchering Tutsis and moderate Hutus without any potential repercussions.

Politically, the next in line to succeed President Habyarimana’s was Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana but the crisis committee that was formed shortly After the President’s assassination refused to accept her authority but instead ordered her to be executed, she, her husband, and some Belgian soldiers were the first to be murdered in the pogrom after which prominent members of the TUTSI ethnicity was killed.

The mass killings in Kigali immediately spread from that city to the remainder of Rwanda. In the initial fourteen days, local administrators in central and southern Rwanda, where most Tutsi lived, opposed the killing. After April 18, State authorities eliminated the resisters and slaughtered a few of them. Other opponents at that point fell quiet or effectively supported the execution. Authorities compensated killers with food, drink, drugs, and cash. Government-supported radio broadcasts began encouraging common Rwandan civilians to kill their neighbors. Within three months, exactly 800,000 individuals had been butchered.

The RPF restarted its hostile not long after Habyarimana’s death. It quickly held onto control of the northern piece of the country and captured Kigali around 100 days after in mid-July, stopping the annihilation.

After its triumph, the RPF set up a coalition government like that agreed upon at Arusha, with Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu, as president, and Paul Kagame, a Tutsi, as VP and defense minister.

After the genocide, more than 1,000,000 individuals were conceivably culpable in the massacre nearly one-fifth of the population remaining after the summer of 1994. The RPF pursued a policy of mass arrests for those responsible and for those persons who took part in the genocide, jailing over 100,000 people in the two years after the genocide. The pace of arrests overwhelmed the physical capacity of the Rwandan prison system, leading to what Amnesty International deemed “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment”. The country’s 19 prisons were designed to hold about 18,000 inmates total, but at their peak in 1998, there were over 100,000 people in crowded detention facilities across the country.

In October 1994, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), situated in Tanzania, was set up as an expansion of the International Criminal Tribunal for previous Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, the primary worldwide court since the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, and the first with the command to arraign the wrongdoing of massacre.

In 1995, the ICTR started prosecuting and attempting various higher-positioning individuals for their job in the Rwandan destruction; the cycle was made more troublesome on the grounds that the whereabouts of numerous suspects were obscure.

The preliminaries proceeded over the course of the following decade and a half, including the 2008 conviction of three previous senior Rwandan guards and military authorities for getting sorted out the destruction.

First image- FILE - Skulls and bones of some of those killed in Rwanda's genocide are seen at a memorial shrine at a Catholic church in Ntarama, Rwanda, on April 4, 2014.

Second image- Tutsi Pastor Anastase Sabamungu (left) and Hutu teacher Joseph Nyamutera visit a Rwanda cementry where 6,000 genocide victims are buried
Copyright- World Vision

Citation- https://www.chrisdaramola.com.ng/remembering-the-1994-rwanda-genocide/

Can't forget these movies, " sometimes in April" and " Hotel Rwanda".

Nigeria should thread carefully,nobody wins in war,everyone suffer losses.

That's my fear... I pray Nigeria doesn't go the way of Rwanda...

War is dreadful

Hmmm! Rip to all the dead

With all these selfish, divisive and religiously biased rulers we have eh, make we dey careful o

If it happens, it happens. mess Nigeria.

Guns don't kill. Humans do.

I still stand for peace my people. No matter how you see it, there is nothing better than peace. May the souls of the dead rest in peace

RIP to the dead

Lessons abound for Nigeria, from that dark time in Rwanda's history. The massacres that started in Nigeria's Middle Belt by cow-herding terrorists, now gradually spreading to other parts of the country, have disturbing parallels to the opening chapters of Rwanda's genocide.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc4nURoSeRg


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3DrvrrSgHI