Shortly after 8 pm on April 6, 1994, an explosion in the sky near Kigali, the Rwandan capital, unleashed the horror. That day, a surface-to-air missile brought down the plane carrying the then presidents of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, and Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, both Hutu, and chaos ensued. In a context of maximum tension and hatred between Hutus and Tutsis, one of the worst genocides in history began the next day. In just over a hundred days, more than 800,000 people from the Tutsi minority, in addition to thousands of moderate Hutus, were killed. The magnitude of the figures illustrates the horror of those days: 8,000 murders a day, 333 every hour, five deaths every minute.
But Rwanda’s was not only one of the fastest genocides in history, it was also terrifyingly popular: most Tutsis were killed not by soldiers or bombings but by Hutu civilians, often armed with machetes or other farming implements. Blinded by a simmering hatred from the political platform or from the media, which called to “eliminate the Tutsi beetles”, thousands of citizens went out to hunt people they often knew.
Everything happened in the face of international inaction. If the 2,500 UN peacekeepers deployed in the country barely did anything and limited themselves to evacuating Westerners, France reacted with a paralysis that condemned thousands of people. Emmanuel Macron himself admitted on Thursday that France could have done more to stop the horror in its former colony. Macron, who when he arrived at the Elysée in 2017 pushed for a commission to clarify the French role, will issue a video today on social networks commemorating the 30th anniversary of the events in which he will regret the inaction. “France, which could have stopped the genocide with the help of its Western or African allies, did not have the will to get involved”, he points out. In a visit in 2021, Macron already admitted France’s “responsibility”. The president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, said that those words meant turning the page in the relations between the two countries.
The United States also did not avoid disaster. Still in shock from the murder, months before, of their soldiers in the battle of Mogadishu, in Somalia, they did not want to risk a new image of American corpses in African lands. Former President Bill Clinton, who was then in office and will head the American delegation at the commemoration events in Rwanda, later regretted the lack of decision. “I don’t think we could have ended the violence, but I do think we could have stopped it. And I’m sorry,” he said.
The brutality in Rwanda had consequences that still last today in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, where, faced with the Tutsi counter-offensive commanded by Kagame, thousands of Hutus fled, including members of the Interahamwe militia, authors of the worst atrocities . In Congolese territory, tens of thousands were massacred in revenge.
Thirty years later, the country has turned around. Dubbed the Switzerland of Africa, Rwanda is a modern, digitized nation with high levels of literacy and parity in institutions. But the echo of the genocide remains: Kagame leads with an iron hand a country of whispers, where it is forbidden by law to define oneself as Tutsi or Hutu and freedom of expression is a chimera. Dozens of opponents and critics of the regime have been arrested or killed, some even in exile.
Rwanda’s great success is its example of social reconciliation. The popular singer and writer Gaël Faye, author of the novel A Small Country, translated into 36 languages, recited an unpublished text yesterday: “Thirty years later, memory remains a burning ember. The wounds are still open and the pain resurfaces at every commemoration. But society has rebelled against the winds and tides and has achieved the impossible: cohabitation between victims and executioners”.
