Obtaining secondary education for Hutus was very difficult and even those who got the education had difficulty getting employment. This resulted in the creation of a special Rwandese Tutsi minority elites that controlled the lives of the majority and who believed in the Belgian and the Tutsi contorted history that made the Tutsis very different from the Hutus, a superior race narrative, which eventually was embedded into the minds of Tutsis for which they eventually paid a very dear price. The Hutus who were denied everything they had prior to the coming of the colonialists and repeatedly told they were inferior to the Tutsis, began to hate all Tutsis. “The time bomb was set and it was now only a question of when it would go off …Rwanda was not a land of peace and bucolic harmony before the arrival of the Europeans (but) there is no trace in its pre-colonial history of systematic violence between Tutsi and Hutu as such…. ideas and myths can kill, and their manipulation by elite leaders for their own material and power interest does not change the fact that in order to operate they first have to be implanted in the souls of men.” (Gerard Prunier, the Rwanda Crisis.) Tutsis started a movement for independence and this angered the Belgians who quickly changed sides and replaced the Tutsi chiefs by Hutus. When Hutu leaders got this power they started settling scores and in 1959 killed over 100,000 Tutsis. A huge number of Tutsis fled to neighboring Uganda, Zaire and Burundi. It was by these refugees that the Rwandan Patriotic Front was established.
In 1994 the RPF, had intensified the war and was closing in Rwanda. Radio des Milles Collines (RTLM) financed by the government launched its program of hate and extermination just after the Arusha Accord. When the president was returning from Arusha, his plane was struck and he was killed. That incident triggered the genocide though the preparation to eliminate the Tutsis had been going on for quiet sometime. A highly educated Rwandese professor, Ferdinand Nahimana was heading the radio programs. It was full of vitriolic propaganda of hate and clear messages for Hutu extremists to go out and kill. The radio was sending out messages that Tutsis were controlling everything and seeking supremacy and this evil and injustice perpetuated by this minority group can “be cured only by their total extermination” calling them hyenas, snakes, cockroaches, etc. It was hateful, dehumanizing, and designed to incite the people to rise up and kill Tutsis, capitalizing on the years of oppression that Hutus have endured under the real or perceived, direct and indirect control of a minority that only represented 15% of the population. It was not a spontaneous uprising. It was an uprising that had been in the making since the Habermanya government took over (the last government before the genocide). But the root of the problem goes back to the colonial period.
Many of the killers believed the Tutsis were evil people who have taken everything for themselves and treated the majority as second-class citizens and therefore deserve to be eradicated. Children wee not spared according to Radio Milles Collines “”you must also kill the rat in gestation; it will grow up to be a rat, like the others.”
They used languages too graphic to repeat (if interested read Hate as a Contagion: the Role of Media in the Rwandan Genocide by Maria Armoudian). Hutus were killed for helping the fleeing Tutsis because, according to the media they were “inyenzi’ cockroaches. Rwandan Hutus were called to rise up and finish the Tutsi once and for all. They were told to use knives, machetes and clubs.
The first few weeks in Kigali were extremely traumatizing for me. Though the RPF had been there for a month and cleaned up the city as much as it can, there were still bodies littered on the outskirts of the city and roadblocks that have not yet been cleaned up, road blocks made of human corpses. We could see bodies floating on river Kivu though thousands had already been swept away down stream, ‘to Ethiopia’ as their killers stated when they threw them in to the river. One church was still full of corpses, with over 700 Tutsis who had run to the church hoping to get protection. The churches all over Rwanda had been the traditional sanctuary for these deeply religious people but on this occasion they became the convenient place where they were killed in mass. Many churches have been used as killing fields because there were a large concentration of frightened people in one small area. In one case over 2000 people had sought refuge in the largest Catholic Church Saint Famille and all of them were killed after the parish priest handed them over to their killers. Apparently he was a supporter of the Hutu extremists. The Ntarama church, where I saw over 700 corpses, has now been turned over to a genocide museum. At the time I arrived there were still some dogs feasting on human corpses and RPF had to go after stray dogs and shoot them.