UC Merced Undergraduate Research Journal

The Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi, Twa, and Hutu moderates of 1994 is one of themost egregious and horrifying instantiations of mass atrocity since Nazi Germany. Despite solemn vows from the mouth of the United Nations to “never again” countenance the terror of genocide in the wake of the Holocaust, the international community largely stood apart, noncommittal and ineffectual, as 800,000 people or more were hunted, tortured, raped, and murdered by a war-torn Hutu populace mobilized into genocidal militias called interahamwe – a Kinyarwanda word meaning “those who fight together”. Indeed, those Hutu who participated in the genocide saw themselves as Rwanda’s defenders against a race of foreign invaders, a separate and altogether lesser subspecies of human stereotyped by ineptitude, duplicity, and depravity — therefore deserving of any brutality the genocidaires could imagine. This belief derived from a racial hierarchy imported into and inflicted upon Rwanda by German and Belgian colonizers. The regime which perpetrated the genocide used a popular radio station to exploit this — and other fault lines in Rwandan society — with terrifying efficacy.