The Rwanda Genocide was a period of extreme violence and brutality that affected many people and lasted for over thirty years. The Hutus and the Tutsi people have been fighting since the early sixties and there is still tension to this day. When the Belgians came in 1916, they declared the Tutsis the higher of the two societies. Ever since then there have been many rebellions and which caused all the massacres in Rwanda. The Hutus people rebelled first and took control in 1959, killing and exiling many of the Tutsi people. Although the Tutsi’s were wealthy, the Hutus made up 85% of the population making it easier for them to take over. A few years later, “the exiled Tutsis, who had fled when the Hutus revolted in 1959, returned to Rwanda as a rebel army and invaded from Burundi” (Rwanda). However, their plan failed to complete, so the Hutu people retaliated with a massacre of over 20,000 Tutsi people.
 |
| Figure 2 This young teenager was only a child when he was hacked with a machete during the Rwandan genocide (Scars). |
A lot of their society was forced to leave their homeland once again because of this action. One year later, the two cultures reached an agreement, but still continued with ethnical violence. In early April of 1994, the president of Rwanda, who was a Hutu, was killed in a suspicious plane crash. This angered the Hutus people, so ”Hutu forces, who credited Tutsi rebels with shooting down the president’s aircraft, then began a series of large-scale massacres of Tutsi and Hutu moderates” (Rwanda). After the plane crash, the Hutus people massacred at least 500,000 Tutsi’s, which then caused a civil war between the two groups. Although this war is resolved, there are still tensionsbetween them to this day.
