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| Figure 3 A Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) rebel walks by the the site of a April 6 plane crash which killed Rwanda's President (Rwanda). |
Rwanda’s genocide was “sparked by the death of the Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, when his plane was shot down above Kigali airport on 6 April 1994“(Rwanda: How the genocide happened). This then caused a massacre of over 500,000 Tutsi’s. However, the tension between the Hutus and the Tutsi’s started when the Belgian colonists arrived because they declared the Tutsi’s the superior of the two societies. They received better jobs and educational opportunities that were not given to the Hutu’s. The Hutu’s and the Tutsi’s are not very different though, they are actually quite similar. They share the same traditions, the areas that they inhabit, and the language that they speak, setting them not far apart on a cultural view. The Hutus people resented this and caused many riots in 1959, over 20,000 Tutsi people were killed and a lot of the others fled to Burundi, Uganda, and Tanzania. The Hutu people had little respect for the Tutsi’s that they killed, therefore, “during the genocide, the bodies of Tutsis were thrown into rivers, with their killers saying they were being sent back to Ethiopia.” (Rwanda: How the genocide happened).
