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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

Modern genocides have been stopped in various ways. The Nazi Holocaust during World War II ended only in the face of a massive external military on­slaught mounted on two fronts, by both the Allies and the Soviet Union. Jewish and Soviet partisans, and resistance movements in Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Italy, Greece, and France all inflicted significant casualties on Nazi forces, in some cases causing substantial losses, but such indigenous opposition played a secondary role in the defeat of the Hitler regime. This is not surprising, because genocidal regimes also tend to be aggressively expansionist, and frequently create international crises or provoke external cross-border retalia­tion.

Yet domestic opposition can also be important. In Bangladesh in 1971, local guerrilla forces resisted the Pakistani army’s genocidal repression until an invading Indian army ended it. In Rwanda in 1994, it was left to an externally-trained but indigenous, predominantly Tutsi insurgent army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, to overthrow the Hutu Power regime and halt its genocide of Tutsis. ­

The Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot collapsed only in the face of an international military intervention: a full-scale Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1979. The Indonesian occupation of East Timor, too, ended only under the substantial international pressure exerted by a United Nations peacekeeping force which arrived in East Timor in 1999. Yet both Cambodia and East Timor had also produced significant indigenous resistance movements, which challenged these genocidal regimes with military force that proved inferior though not ineffectual. Resistance forces were able to draw upon or muster important indigenous political support that contributed to the eventual defeat of the two perpetrator regimes. The factors that led them to take action merit study.

Although these two Southeast Asian genocidal dictatorships, respectively communist and militarist, came from opposite ends of the political spectrum, and the motives of the rebel lead­ers who confronted them varied, both of the resistance movements originated in radical leftist political parties. National independence was a major goal of the Fretilin guerrilla movement in East Timor, and Maoist ideology was an additional influence on some of its leaders. Along with indigenous racism, Maoism was also a major element of the ideology of Pol Pot’s Cambodian regime, but Mao’s thinking had initially also influenced the Khmer Rouge cadres who rebelled against that regime. In both Cambodia and East Timor, however, the leading resistance forces, though they began as radical organizations, also became more moderate over time in the face of genocide and extermination. Other resistance movements in various regions of the world have followed different trajectories.

Rebel movements that inflict casualties on perpetrator regimes are of course not the only forms of resistance worth studying. In various cases, organized non-violent or passive resistance has also obstructed mass repression and rescued targeted victims. At an individual level, more everyday forms of resistance have also enabled victims to sur­vive, including by enabling them to maintain their dignity and self-respect. These other kinds of resistance deserve equal attention.

For more on armed and unarmed resistance movements, see for instance:

Yitzhak Arad, “The Armed Jewish Resistance in Eastern Europe: Its Unique Conditions and its Relations with the Jewish Councils (Judenrate) in the Ghettoes,” in The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Re-examined, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, 591-600.

Ben Kiernan, Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation, Denial and Justice in Cambodia and East Timor, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 2008.

Jacques Semelin, Unarmed against Hitler: Civilian Resistance in Europe, 1939-1943, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993.

James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985;

James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1990;

Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979, 2nd ed., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002, 246-50.