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The genocide in 1994 was perhaps the most clear-cut case of genocide since the Holocaust: as certain actors made clear the intent to destroy the Tutsi population, hundreds of thousands were killed.  Hundreds of thousands more were raped, maimed, or otherwise traumatized.  As much as 90% of Rwanda’s pre-1994 Tutsi population (which was estimated to comprise about 14% of the country’s total population) was murdered.  The extermination effort took place within the context of a renewed civil war, but much of the carnage involved civilians far away from the front lines.  Indeed, the government of Rwanda appeared to have diverted substantial military resources from the front lines to the effort to slaughter civilians.

The basic contours of the genocide are well-known.  A three-year civil war pitting the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) against the predominantly Hutu government (the Rwandese National Movement for Democracy and Development, or MRNDD) and its forces had ended in a peace agreement, The Arusha Accord, in August of 1993.  The accord called for the creation of a transitional government incorporating elements of the incumbent regime, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (the political wing of the RPA), and the mixed ethnic domestic opposition.  It also provided for a UN force of oversee the transition.  However, after months of negotiations and false starts, the parties failed to agree on the specific make-up of the transitional regime.  When a plane carrying the president of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana, was shot down from the sky as it returned from negotiations over the transitional government on April 6, 1994, organized street violence quickly ensued.  Hardliners –i.e., those who had most resisted partnership with the rebels – maneuvered to gain control of the government, not least by assassinating the incumbent, Agatha Uwilingiyimana, a Hutu who had favored the implementation of the accord.  Soon, government forces (including the army and the presidential guard), along with non-governmental allies (generally affiliated with political parties, such as the infamous interahamwe – the youth wing of MRNDD) were targeting both political rivals and Tutsi civilians.  Many of the intended targets congregated in places where they believed they would be safe, such as churches, government buildings, and factories.  Instead, those locales became massacre sites, as government forces, militia members, and other members of the civilian population attacked them en masse.

The genocide only ended when the RPA rebels, who had abandoned the peace agreement themselves on April 8, gained control of Kigali and all government offices in July of 1994.  Hundreds of thousands of RPA supporters began to enter the country from Uganda another neighboring areas, meaning that a substantial portion of the Tutsi population that had been killed was “replaced” by a Tutsi population returning from exile.  For its part, the interim government that had overseen the genocidal effort tried to flee to neighboring Zaire, while bringing over a million, mostly Hutu refugees with it.

Among the issues that Rwanda has had to deal with since the genocide are the status of ex-government forces and refugee populations in neighboring countries, the pursuit of justice for crimes committed during (and as part of) the genocide, and the political, economic, and social reconstruction of a country devastated by intense conflict.

The Genocide Studies Program’s Rwandan Genocide Project was founded in 2002, and began with a study of how GIS imaging revealed indications of genocide in the western part of the country.  After lying dormant for several years, it has recently been revived under the director ship of David Simon.  The project serves as a resource for students and educators studying Rwanda and the 1994 genocide.  A central focus of the project is the preservation of documentation and testimonies related to the genocide.

Other GSP-sponsored research on Rwanda

phd dissertations

• Charles Mironko, GSP Associate Director, Social and Political Mechanisms of Mass Murder: An Analysis of Perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide, Yale University, Department of Anthropology, submitted March 2004.
• Philip Verwimp, GSP Visiting Fellow (1999, 2002-04), Development and Genocide in Rwanda: A Political Economy Analysis of Peasants and Power under the Habyarimana Regime, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, 2003.

Director

• David Simon

The primary benefit of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is the ability to interrelate spatially multiple types of information assembled from a range of sources. These data do not necessarily have to be visual. GIS “shape files” are helpful for interpolating and visualizing many other types of data, e.g. demographic data. Many research models rely on the ability to analyze and extract information from images by using a variety of computer-available research tools and then express these findings as part of a project with images in a variety of layers and scenes.

Remote sensing is the measurement of object properties on Earth’s surface using data acquired from aircraft and satellites. It attempts to measure something at a distance, rather than in situ, and, for research purposes, displays those measurements over a two-dimensional spatial grid, i.e. images. Remote-sensing systems, particularly those deployed on satellites, provide a repetitive and consistent view of Earth facilitating the ability to monitor the earth system and the effects of human activities on Earth. There are many electromagnetic (EM) band-length ranges that Earth’s atmosphere absorbs. The EM band ranges transmittable through Earth’s atmosphere are sometimes referred to as atmospheric windows.

The human eye detects, through the reflective solar radiance humans actually see, only that part of the EM scale in the band length range 0.4 – 0.7 μm. But remote sensing technology allows for the detection of other reflective and radiant (e.g. thermal) energy band-length ranges that reach or are emitted by Earth’s surface, and even some that Earth’s atmosphere reflects, e.g. the EM reflective qualities of clouds. Hence, for viewing purposes, red, green, and blue (RGB) false color assignments are used to express the reflective qualities of objects in these EM band-length groups, and the combination and mixing of these false color assignments express the true physical reflective qualities of all objects present in an image.

When utilizing satellite images to assess most types of land-cover change, primarily those involving change in vegetation coverage, variations in climate must be considered. For better control and accuracy in these analyses, comparing images acquired during the same month or season is advisable. But due to the limited availability of satellite images, obtaining materials corresponding both spatially and temporally to the location and period under research are not always possible. Furthermore, annual and seasonal climate data are not always available for the region or temporal period being researched. Sometimes, changes in average rainfall, temperature, etc. must be inferred using more macro regional or global data.

One standard remote sensing application for detecting temporal change in land cover, especially vegetation, is the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). The NDVI application involves a ratio formula between the visual red and NIR EM bands. This ratio application helps to distinguish healthy and stronger vegetation reflection from other materials with similar reflective qualities in those EM band wavelength groups. NDVI applications are useful because two images can be processed into a false color composite, which allows for visual temporal change detection in vegetation coverage.

Moreover, by applying standardized thresholds to multiple NDVI manipulated images, one can create classification training regions and execute supervised computer-generated classifications of multiple images. From these resulting images, area summary reports are calculated. These empirical data enable a more accurate assessment of change in area of the corresponding land-cover classes. More information on some of the above topics, as well as a more comprehensive description of some remote sensing technologies, and a glossary of terms, may be found in the 2009 GSP document, “An Introduction to Remote Sensing and GIS,” compiled by Russell Schimmer. 

The CGP, 1994-2019

The Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, in which approximately 1.7 million people lost their lives (21% of the country’s population), was one of the worst human tragedies of the last century. As in the Ottoman Empire during the Armenian genocide, in Nazi Germany, and more recently in East Timor, Guatemala, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge regime headed by Pol Pot combined extremist ideology with ethnic animosity and a diabolical disregard for human life to produce repression, misery, and murder on a massive scale. On July 18, 2007, Cambodian and international co-prosecutors at the newly established mixed UN/Cambodian tribunal in Phnom Penh found evidence of “crimes against humanity, genocide, grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, homicide, torture and religious persecution.”  On November 16, 2018, the Cambodian and international judges of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) ruled that the former Khmer Rouge regime headed by Pol Pot had perpetrated genocide in Cambodia while it held power during 1975-1979. The court convicted Pol Pot’s former deputy, Nuon Chea, and the Khmer Rouge regime’s head of state, Khieu Samphan, of genocide of the ethnic Vietnamese minority of Cambodia, and also convicted Nuon Chea of genocide of the country’s Cham Muslim minority. Both men were also convicted of extermination and various other crimes against humanity, and were sentenced to life imprisonment. These convictions mean that most of the surviving top leaders of the Democratic Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) regime have now been jailed, prosecuted, or convicted of crimes they committed when in power in 1975-79. Two died in prison awaiting prosecution or during their trial, but three survived to face judgement and are now serving life sentences.

Since 1994, the award-winning Cambodian Genocide Program, a project of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, has been studying these events to learn as much as possible about the tragedy, and to help determine who was responsible for the crimes of the Pol Pot regime. In Phnom Penh in 1996, for instance, we obtained access to the 100,000-page archive of that defunct regime’s security police, the Santebal. This material has been microfilmed by Yale University’s Sterling Library and made available to scholars worldwide. As of January 2008, we have also compiled and published 22,000 biographic and bibliographic records, and over 6,000 photographs, along with documents, translations, maps, and an extensive list of CGP books and research papers on the genocide, as well as the CGP’s newly-enhanced, interactive Cambodian Geographic Database, CGEO, which includes data on: Cambodia’s 13,000 villages; the 115,000 sites targeted in 231,00 U.S. bombing sorties flown over Cambodia in 1965-75, dropping half a million or more tons of munitions; 158 prisons run by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime during 1975-1979, and 309 mass-grave sites with an estimated total of 19,000 grave pits; and 76 sites of post-1979 memorials to victims of the Khmer Rouge.

To examine these, and other information we have discovered, click on one of the links on the sidebar.

For a more detailed introduction to the CGP, click here.

Yale assistance to Documentation Center of Cambodia, 1995-2005 (DC-Cam).