Dan Snow's History Hit - Rwandan Genocide Explained

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

Warning: This episode contains some upsetting descriptions of human suffering.The Rwandan Genocide is a dark and pivotal moment in modern history; the catastrophic consequence of ethnic division and global inaction. Over 100 days in 1994, it's estimated around 800,000 predominantly Tutsi people were killed by the Hutu government and civilian militiamen. The groundwork for the atrocities had been laid decades earlier by the colonial Belgian powers that controlled Rwanda and sowed the seeds of division into the fabric of the country.Dan is joined by Dr Scott Straus, a professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley who unpacks the events and years that led up to the genocide as well as the inaction from the international community during it. Dan also hears from survivor Beatha Uwazaninka who was just a teenager when her entire family were killed and describes how neighbours turned on neighbours as she struggled to evade capture herself. Together they explain how and why the genocide happened and what lessons we should learn from it.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everyone, you're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. It's the 30th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, the massacre predominantly of Tutsi people, which is the second largest ethnic group in Rwanda and Burundi. It is one of the most heart-wrenching, one of the most disturbing episodes of my lifetime in modern history. In the span of around 100 days, from April to July 1994, around 800,000 people were brutally murdered in Rwanda. Although the true numbers will never probably be known, estimates go as high as well over a million. Now on top of that, thousands of

women were raped and people abused in so many ways. This campaign of terror was waged by the Hutu majority government and civilian militias. And it's the speed and the scale of the violence that was so unprecedented. It seems that something like 8,000 people a day were killed. And it's tragically one of the fastest, most efficient campaigns of mass murder in the 20th century. It was the catastrophic consequence of ethnic division, of propaganda, of hatred, and of international apathy. Throne and genocide was characterised by the use of radio to incite hate and violence, to turn neighbour against neighbour, and to normalise the act of killing. And the international community's failure to act, despite very clear warnings,

well, it underscores the tragedy of global indifference, the consequences of inaction, and the challenges it poses us to this day is when to intervene, when to act, when can it be justified. On this anniversary of the Renner genocide, we're honouring those who perished, but we're also trying to learn from the past. Leaders repeatedly promised that the slow response, the failure to intervene, would be a lesson to the future. There would be a responsibility to protect, there would be mechanisms for presenting future genocides. But as we can see in ethnic violence around the world today, it seems like,

tragically, we are doomed to keep repeating those monstrous errors. On the show today, I'm joined by Beata Uwazaninka. She was a teenager when the genocide took place. She spent 100 days starving, living hand to mouth, running from machete-wielding militiamen as her mother, aunts and uncles were killed. She now lives in the Midlands of England with her husband and family, and she spends her time promoting understanding and the awareness of the genocide. We're also going to hear from Dr. Scott Strauss. He's a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, a former journalist in East Africa. His work focuses on violence, on human rights and African politics, and he's going to help me unpack the events, the divisions, the tensions that culminated in the genocide and the international response or lack of as it was going on. Today, the international

community is still hunting those who committed atrocities. But the reality for those living in Rwanda is that many survivors still live alongside perpetrators. The situation 30 years later is still very difficult to resolve. As you can imagine, there are elements of this episode that contain harrowing and very difficult details to listen to about human suffering. So please listen with caution. T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king.

No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. To begin with, let's have a little context that brought up two events in the 1990s. For much of the 20th century, Rwanda was a Belgian colony. It transferred from German control after the First World War. And the Belgians administered the territory by taking advantage of a system of ethnic division. They helped to entrench that.

They favoured the Tutsi minority over the Hutu majority, using Tutsi officials, for example, in administrative roles. Now, Dr. Scott Strauss tells me about the role of colonial Belgium in sowing the seeds of those ethnic tensions. So Rwanda pre-colonially, so if you go back to the 19th century and even before, there was a monarchy. And at the heart of the monarchy, there was a sort of status differentiation between two groups that were the Hutu, who were primarily farmers, lower status, and Tutsi, who. And they essentially racialized that differentiation, which had previously been associated with status and economic activity. And they said the Hutu were Bantu people, quote unquote, so-called Negroid people, who were an inferior race to the Tutsi, who they considered to be more white-like or quote-unquote Caucasoid people. These are all

colonial language. And they essentially built the colonial system around that racial interpretation of these two groups. And so they systematically elevated Tutsis to position of power. They racialized these identities in the sense of trying to quote-unquote scientifically measure them, ultimately introduced identity cards that marked people's ethnicity on them or their race on them. And so these really kind of widened the differences. They institutionalized the differences. They made them part of the power structure that is Tutsi, effectively the local rulers under the colonial system. And all of that had a pretty major impact in the sense that it exaggerated polarization, it created resentments on the part of the Hutu, and essentially set the stage for what became a

very violent revolution at independence, which in a longer term set the stage for the genocide. The push for independence gained momentum in the 1950s. The Hutu majority started to demand more rights, and that led to the Rwandan Revolution, also known, the Hutu majority started to demand more rights. And that led to the Rwandan Revolution, also known as the Hutu Revolution, from 1959 to 61. That culminated in the overthrow of the Tutsi monarchy, huge violence, and the flight of many Tutsi into exile. On the 1st of July 1962, Rwanda eventually gained its independence from Belgium. Gregoire Kaibanda became the first president, leading a government that was predominantly Hutu. So this revolution that happened in independence saw quite a bit of violence against Tutsis. And many Tutsis who

had previously been the sort of local rulers under the colonial system, many of them fled Rwanda. And they went to Europe, to both neighboring countries, but also farther afield into Europe and to North America. And the period after independence, they were kind of systematically discriminated against. You had Tutsi who were living in the diaspora, both close by to Rwanda and then farther afield. in the diaspora, both close by to Rwanda and then fly their field. Come the late 1980s, they form a rebel organization, an insurgency. And many of the leaders of that insurgency had been fighting in Uganda, in a neighboring country, and had gained a very significant battle experience. And they formed this insurgency.

And in 1990, they attacked Rwanda and invaded Rwanda, starting the civil war in late 1990. And most of them were the descendants of Tutsis who had fled Rwanda during the violent revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s. And so they were primarily Tutsi living in the diaspora, not entirely Tutsi. There were some Hutus who were opposed to the ruling authorities in Rwanda at the time who joined the insurgency, but the hardcore, the main soldiers, the officers, they were primarily Tutsi and they started the war in 1990. So the problem for the domestic Tutsis, I guess, they now can be seen as a kind of fifth column. They're a dangerously insecure minority within a country at war.

Yeah, that's exactly right. So one of the key dynamics that happens in this period from 1990 to 1994, when the genocide happens, is that the domestic Tutsi are seen to be either complicit with or directly supporting or directly aiding through information, through recruits, through hiding soldiers, or having secret cells, etc., to be associated with the insurgency. And the Tutsi category becomes one that is suspicious and is seen as sympathetic to or actually the enemy. That's at least the logic. That's the propaganda of the ruling party at the time. This is one of the ways that they essentially crafted a counterinsurgency strategy is to say that the domestic Tutsi population

were fighting alongside or supporting or directly aiding their wartime enemies. So that's a key factor. And there was a political calculation as well. At the time, there was also an effort to democratize Rwanda in the sense that there was the reintroduction of multi-party competition. Rwanda, like many African states through much of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, had been a single party dictatorship. And in the early 1990s, there was a wave of democratization and Rwanda had the reintroduction of multiple political parties. So the ruling party at the time was facing twin threats. It was facing a threat on the one hand from this Tutsi-led insurgency and was facing a political threat from a primarily Hutu domestic opposition.

seeing a political threat from a primarily Hutu domestic opposition. And their strategy was, on the one hand, to say that the domestic Tutsi population are associated with the wartime enemy, but also they wanted to try to unify the Hutu population around them by creating this common enemy. And so it was also a political strategy to unify the Hutu population against the Tutsis as a way of weakening the political opposition that was primarily Hutu. And talk to me about the things that we hear and read about with the work that was done to prepare people for genocide. The music, the radio station seems to be a big thing. What's going on culturally? Yeah, absolutely. So this sort of crisis period in the 1990s or after the war starts, after this, you have this period of democratization, you see a radicalization inside the ruling party, inside Rwanda, and it takes a number of different forms.

So one of the key forms is the formation of militias, of paramilitaries. Initially, they were really a kind of counterinsurgency strategy. That is, you want to arm local civilians as a way to counter any type of insurgency beginning. But ultimately, they became part of a tool to attack Tutsis, right? So it's kind of counterinsurgency to attack this wartime enemy, but ultimately the wartime enemy gets associated with the ethnic Tutsi population. So the formation of militias, the arming of local communities is one key factor in this run up to the genocide. The second is this, in general, heavy investment in Hutu nationalism as the idea that's going to protect Rwanda, that's going to unify the Hutu population against the Tutsis. And that takes a number of different forms. It takes the form of political speech. It takes the form of printed

magazine articles, takes the form also of radio, as you mentioned. So the radio was at the time that there was this sort of political liberalization, there was also a liberalization of the airwaves. And there was a formation in particular of a private media station called RTLM. The owners of that radio station were strongly associated with the ruling party in Rwanda. And they essentially just ran with this nationalism with racism. Racism was essentially the calling card of the radio station. And in the run-up to the genocide, they were broadcasting very hateful messages about the Tutsis, reminding the audience that in the past, Tutsis had been oppressors,

and they had really treated Hutus as slaves and as servants and reminding them of that history using music, using kind of modern technology to win over people's adherence and get them excited about these ideas and so forth. And so I think that was a part of a broader racialization, polarization, propaganda effort on the part of the ruling party and part of this broader strategy of trying to unify the Hutu population around this common Tutsi enemy. Then during the genocide, the radio also at different times broadcast where Tutsis were hiding and essentially heated people's heads, as Rwandans like to say, kind of made them scared and made them want to attack Tutsis. Now, I would say all that. I think it's also important not to overstate the role of the radio. It depends on really how we think about it. It's a kind of easy thing for people to latch on to. Rwandans heard things on the radio, then they went out and committed violence. It was much more complicated

than that, I would say. If we're talking about the genocide itself, a lot of the actual mobilization for violence happened face to face. It happened through people going to homes and saying, you want a man from this house and we want a man from that house or calling people to meetings. The radio contributed to an overall sense of radicalization and polarization and hate, but it was not, in many cases, was not the reason why people picked up a weapon and went out and attacked their neighbors, per se. I say that because I think there's a kind of stereotype about Rwandans that they heard things on the radio and then they went

out and did things. They made much more complex calculations at the time. What catalyzed those calculations? In April 94, what happened? those calculations. In April 94, what happened? So the genocide started on basically April 6, 1994. President Haberimana was returning to Rwanda in his private plane, and that plane was shot down over Kigali, over the capital. Who shot down the plane is a subject of enduring controversy, but let's just bracket that for just a second. But with the assassination of the president, you see very quickly violence start to happen in a number of parts around the country. So in the capital, there are roadblocks set up. In other parts of the country where the ruling party had a tremendous amount of support, similarly you saw roadblocks.

And on these roadblocks, essentially people were looking for Tutsis. And where they found them, they often killed them in those first days. The other thing that happened in those first days is when the president was assassinated, you saw the kind of hardliners, the radicals in the ruling party maneuver to take over the country in this period. And they effectively eliminated the political opposition and the moderates in the ruling party and kind of hijacked the state and took it over within those first couple of days. And ultimately, they're going to set Rwanda on a radical path, really starting after about five days or so. And then the other thing that happens is that the civil war starts. So there had been in place at the time a ceasefire and a peace plan between the Tutsi rebels and the government. And with the assassination and with these moves on

the part of the radicals to take over, the civil war starts again, the rebels start to invade. And so these are kind of factors of escalation. The war starts again, the president is assassinated, factors of escalation, the war starts again, the president is assassinated, the radicals take over, and they're going to implement a strategy of trying to eliminate the domestic Tutsi population as their way to keep power, as their way to inflict revenge, and whatever they're thinking is hard sometimes to know. But it was this logic of the Hutu are the majority, the Tutsi should not rule, and we're going to eliminate them as a way to win this war, as a way to keep power. And so pretty quickly, essentially starting from the top, there are these instructions

that the Tutsis are the enemy. They need to be eliminated. That sets in motion across the country, this very rapid mobilization of the local civilian authorities who in turn mobilize the population. And they go house to house looking for Tutsis. Tutsis begin to congregate in what they thought would be safe areas, churches, in what they thought would be safe areas, churches, schools, government offices. And then those areas were subsequently attacked, often with militia support or even military support, and the large crowds of usually young men who had been mobilized to participate in this violence. And those were often the sites of these massacres.

Beata, who is Tutsi, was 14 years old when the violence started. And before we get into her story, she wants to make a point about the term random genocide. She wants to state that it's important to make the distinction clear that it was a genocide against the Tutsi specifically. For me, it's a genocide against Tutsi because when it happened, it was aimed directly to Tutsi. There is also denierism, those who want to deny that there was a genocide against Tutsi in Rwanda. So they use the Rwanda genocide to divert from the truth. It was not anything else. It's not Rwanda. It's a genocide against Tutsi that happened. Again, just a warning here that there are some harrowing details coming up in her account.

For Beata, the violence her family experienced began before 1994, in those tumultuous years leading up to it. My life before the genocide against Tutsi was, I have to say, fine. My father died when I was two. And so from there, I grew up with my mom and my grandmother. So the life was not really bad. It was a normal life of a village. If I look it from the eyes I have today, I would say we was in a poor, maybe absolute poverty, but because it was a life many people had in the village, You don't see it. You don't see the rich from the poor when we all have the same life.

So it was quite a good life. It was a life where I would spend time playing hide and seek with other kids in the village, in the banana plantation, which I'm sure you have seen a lot of those, in the sorghum field. It was where we go to hunt wild fruits. field. It was where we go to hunt wild fruits. It was a good childhood, but at the age of seven, I think my life kind of changed in a different way, dramatically, when my grandmother was killed. And your grandmother sounds like an amazing person. And one of the many things she did for you, but she shielded you from the politics that was turning ever more toxic. You didn't know about the rhetoric. You didn't know about the rhetoric.

You didn't know about the threat of intercommunal violence as a child. Did she protect you? Yeah, because when we grew up, I remember hearing someone say Tootsie. And I thought Tootsie was a French word that I didn't understand. I was, what is Tootsie? Who's Tootsie? So my grandmother never told me that, mainly because she was a villager healer. She would spend a day in the forest looking for specific plants to heal some people who

were unwell in the village. They even had a nickname for her as a Red Cross of the village. So my grandmother would not be the woman who would tell me, oh, you are different or these people are bad because she cured every person in the village, regardless of who they are. So she protected me from actually thinking that there's some bad people or the people who don't like us. And to be honest with you, at the time, things weren't bad in the villages. They were just on the political ground.

Maybe it was, but in the small village, we didn't get it. And you were seven years old, you mentioned, and things started. Yeah, it was not like a big war or killing or whatever. It was just one person at a time. So when my grandmother was murdered, she already had a plan to move to Uganda. I remember on one Sunday when she told me, we're going to go live in another country. And I was confused. Where's another country?

I didn't understand. She said, no, we're going to go somewhere. And I will protect you. I'll make sure you're fine. No problem. No harm will come to you. She told me that. So she was planning to sell her land and we'll go to live in Uganda.

And on that night, and that's when people came to our house and they killed her with a hammer. Why? My grandmother was not a woman who was keeping quiet. She used to talk about what is going on with the neighbours. And at the time when it happened, when they killed her, it was just because she was about to escape and she was a Tutsi and she knew what was going on. And therefore they didn't want her to leave the village.

They didn't want her to escape. I remember it very vividly because our neighbor just came in with the same group of people who came to peer, my grandmother. And what happened to you? At the time, I was only as a child. There's nothing else I could do. When they came, she was fast asleep. I was the one who was awake.

And we lived in a hut, a grass-roofed house, and the door was not exactly that strong. So they pushed the door in and they came in. Sometimes when I asked what was I feeling, sometimes I don't know what I felt at the time. Somehow I felt nothing. I don't know what I felt. It just, I covered my face as a child.

And so what happened, they dragged her out and they were trying to throw her body in the river. But my grandmother was very tall and they didn't manage to get her far. So they dumped her behind our house and she rolled down in the ditch. Was that one of a series of killings in your neighborhood, in your community, or was this at the time a single event? It wasn't like a massive killing.

The killing of Tutsis was one by one. People forget when we say genocide against Tutsi. In 1994, it was a final solution. It was a final time. Every time people ask me, oh, so it started in April, on the 7th of April. No, it started way before. The killing of Tutsi have taken place way, way before. So your grandmother was killed in 1987.

In 1991, 1992, there were also killings. So as an 8, 9, 10 year old, you were aware that you were in danger. You and members of your community and family were in danger of just being summarily killed. and at that time things stopped a little bit but I went to school by the time I was nine every Wednesday we had the history class and the history class was to teach how Tutsi were bad against the Hutu in the past and they were asked to stand up in a class and the Hutu to stand up well first time when they asked I told the teacher I don't know what I am. She asked me, go and ask your mother. I went home. I asked my mom, who am I? Am I a Tutsi? Am I a Hutu?

My mother told me, no, go and tell them you're a Umuzigawa. Umuzigawa, it's a clan. It's not a tribe. So when I went back to school, I told my teacher, I am Umuzigawa. So she said to me, from now on, we know who you are anyway. We know your mother. You stand when we call Tutsi. From that day, it was just me and my other classmates.

Every time they would call us stand up, Tutsi to stand up, we would stand up. And after school, we would be fighting on the way home with the other students because we are Tutsi. We were straight of freedom. The president of Rwanda's plane was shot down near the capital city in April 1994. And that's traditionally what's said to have ignited the bloodiest phase of the genocide against the Tutsi. Do you remember that week, that day? I remember that time when the plane was shot down. And in the morning, there was a classic music on

the radio, because classic was always played because someone important died. Everything was very strange. The morning, the street was quiet, but there was voices, people being dragged out of their house. The only thing we could hear was a truck every now and then passing by, soldiers. At the time I was in Kigalu. I remember looking outside, there was a police station At the time, I was in Kigali. I remember looking outside. There was a police station not far from where I was.

It was full of bodies. They were killing people and putting them there. And then they would bring a big truck, which would take the people and take them to dump them in a place called Kabeza. On the 15th of April, I went to the market when a woman shouted my nickname. So for someone to know your nickname, it's because they know you from a childhood. And then I looked back and I tried to avoid her eyes. She said, oh no, your mom and dad.

She said all the names. They were drowned yesterday. My mother was killed on the 14th of April. She was drowned with her legs cut because they say cockroaches can't spin, she was drowned I never buried her, it took me

a good 10 years to actually believe that she would never come back I went back home, I cried for hours because I knew I'd never have time to cry for her again because I didn't know whether I would survive This is not outside groups coming in. It's not militias coming into an area and killing strangers.

This is neighbours killing neighbours. That's correct. I would say it's a neighbour killing neighbours. Dan, the most painful thing I've ever had to work in my life is working from where they took my mother to go to drown her. That was 40 minutes. And 40 minutes, nobody thought to themselves, what are we doing?

When did they switch their brain? How did they switch it off? How much the genocide ideology has been dreaded to people? Beata wasn't at home when her mother was killed. She was living in Kigali, where she was studying in the city. She was staying with her uncle and his family. But it wasn't long before militiamen arrived at their door in the capital too.

When you were staying with your uncle and your cousins, did you see them killed or were you able to escape before? I was able to escape before, but at the same time, you can see through the door, the keyhole. My uncle was in the lounge, his wife, and his girls were trying to run outside the house to go outside the gates. They were killed on the gate, but for me, I went through the other door. Your family were killed. You'd heard your mother was killed. Were you also witnessing at this point, was the violence everywhere?

Yes. I'm sure if you've been to kigali you know where there's a big trains and there was one particular man who was killed in front of me strangely enough i formed a relationship because i feel like i've seen him in his agony and every day i passed i would just kind of a glass at his body until I could see the bone of his legs getting thinner in his shoes. As these women I've seen in Nyemiranguini, still there now, at Nyemiranguini, there were three of them.

They were dragged and dropped from the second roof of the building. I have seen enough and have escaped enough as well. You listened to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about the Rwandan genocide. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

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Wherever you get your podcasts. Beata was able to evade the militias as they went around Kigali, performing ethnic cleansing. She remembers seeing men digging their own graves before being killed. She remembers hearing loudspeaker announcements in the streets, calling on anyone who was Tutsi or even looked like a Tutsi to be killed. She hid and she waited and she prayed. She saw bullets flying across at night between two hilltops, on one of which was the Rwandan Patriotic Front, who were rebel Tutsis who'd returned from exile to try and take back control of Rwanda and Hutu militias. And she

remembers how on the morning of the 4th of July, one of those Randon Patriotic Front, one of those Tutsi soldiers arrived at her gate. It meant that the genocide was largely over. But the fighting between the RPF and the Hutu continued. Beata returned home to her village to search for her mother's body, but she never found it. Scott, what brought it to an end? Well, what brought it to the end was the civil war. This war starts after the assassination of the president, after the radicals take over, after the genocide begins. And the Tutsi rebels, effectively, they're winning during this period against government forces. By mid-July, they're able to completely take over the country.

So the rebels, even though they were Tutsis who represent the minority, even though they were fighting against a government whose strategy was genocide to try to defeat them or deter them, ultimately those rebels win. They take over Rwanda in mid-July. And those rebels are still ruling Rwanda today. They're called the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the RPF. And the president of Rwanda, Paul Ngami, was the head of the rebels at the time. So that's basically what stopped the genocide. The research that you have to do, it must be very distressing, but what has it taught you about why human beings will turn on their neighbors, their friends, even members of an extended family? What has to happen

to make that situation? This is one of the big questions that I had. I had been a journalist and I had been in the area and then ended up turning academic. And this is one of the biggest questions I had. And when I first started the work, I really thought it had to do with the radio. I thought it had to do with, you know, kind of pure racism and the history of prejudice in the country. government, but ordinary people who were mobilized to take part in the killing of their neighbors. I think a lot of it had to do with fear. A lot of it had to do with the sense that this was a crisis, this was an emergency, this was a war, the president had been killed, and this was a struggle for survival. And the Tutsis represented a threat to that survival. And they were scared if Tutsis took over that they would be killed or that they would be hurt, that their families would be hurt. So that's one part of the

fear equation. And the second part of the fear equation has to do with coercion. It has to do with both coercion from the state, you know, vertical coercion, but also horizontal or peer pressure coercion and pressure. That is that people were told, you have to come with us. And if you don't come with us, we'll consider you to be a traitor and to be complicit with the wartime enemy. And so they also were kind of making calculations. Well, if I don't participate, there are going to be negative consequences for myself, for my family, for my future, et cetera.

And that follows. I think it's important to see that in the context of Rwanda, which is this very densely packed state. It's a very small state, this history of social control and effective state mobilization. In other words, the idea that the state mobilizes the population is a very longstanding one in Rwanda. So the idea when someone comes to your door or calls you to a meeting and says, you have to participate, that was an idea that was very

resonant for many Rwandans. So I mean, ultimately, when you know, Vyaspi as a human being, I think that a lot of the decisions at the local level were very situational, very context specific. Decisions at the local level were very situational, very context specific. And the context was a war, an emergency, the president having been killed, sort of sense of fires in the distance. And like this was a defining moment for one's life. themselves, either in the context of that war, or to save themselves from being attacked by their neighbors or by the mobs or by the state, who also could have inflicted damage. Now, that's in general. You know, I just also want to quickly mention, there were definitely opportunists, people who went out and wanted to steal, people who wanted to use this period to grab power, kind of become big and become important, people who found notoriety.

And then also people changed after they killed. People also, I think after they did this once, they became numb and it became easier the second, the third, the fourth time to do it. Beth, can I ask you, you said you talked to the people that killed your mother. Did you find them? Yeah, I found the guy. The guy still lives in the village and I used to go to school with his children. He was in jail for a bit, but then they came out because there's a time where the chacha, the village courts,

where they were all tried in the village and they were just released. And he's fine. He's an old man. He's going to die old. My mother died at 39. She'll never regain that. How did you feel when you met that man?

I cannot feel forgiveness because what I feel is empty. died at 39. She'll never regain that. How did you feel when you met that man? I cannot feel forgiveness because what I feel is empty. Empty is the word. Because forgiveness, for me, I feel like I'll betray my mother if I forgive the person who killed her. He didn't kill me. He killed my mother. So he should be forgiving himself, not me. And so far that nobody's ever came to me and said, I'm sorry. No one has ever said that. You can forgive for someone to steal your car or even betray you in some other way. But taking the life of somebody for who, why would you be forgiven? Why would anybody even be forgiven? Maybe that sounds like an extreme, but I don't believe it because i don't have that enough

i don't have it in me scott president clinton says that it was the great regret of his term in office that he should have somehow intervened so right the other really big story with rwanda of course was the failure to stop it on the part of international actors let's bracket clinton for just a second and just talk about the general situation. The peace agreement that was signed in Rwanda in 1993, one of the components of it was to have a UN peacekeeping force that was designed to monitor the ceasefire and monitor the different terms of the agreement and to make sure that they were being put into place. And so there was a relatively small, compared to contemporary standards, UN peacekeeping force that was assembled and deployed to Rwanda in late 1993. And this was led by a Canadian force commander, subsequently became very famous, Romeo Dallaire. They were in

place as the escalation that we were talking about earlier was sort of happening around them, you know, the radio, the militias, and they themselves had a lot of warning that things could go really badly, including the famous testimony of someone who was training the militias and saying, look, we have evidence that there's a preparation for mass killing of Tutsis. There were these evidence of weapons caches and so forth, which is to say that there were warning signs prior to the onset of genocide in April 1994, that there was a real risk of something going quite badly. And none of that was acted upon. You fast forward then to April of 1994, and the genocide begins, and a couple of

different things happen. One is that to the West, I mean, to the global North, it was framed as tribalism. It was framed as these are Hutus and Tutsis who are different tribes who've hated each other for centuries. And there's nothing that the West, nothing the global North can do about it, right? And so that's fundamentally wrong on like 10 different levels. One of them being there are no tribes in Rwanda. Hutus and Tutsis speak the same language. They live in the same area. They're in the same clans. It was this internal, really class status differentiation that had been racialized. So it's not really a tribal difference in some ways, right?

Second part to remember was that this came on the heels of what had happened in Somalia. Listeners may remember that in 1993, there some americans who were trying to capture a political leader in mogadishu the capital they were captured they were killed that was filmed on television it was a kind of at least for the united states a kind of foreign policy disaster and the lesson of it for the united states and also for the united nations because there were un peacekeepers as well in somalia was a kind of deep aversion to risk. Like we don't want to put our troops at risk in these humanitarian missions, in these places that where our constituents have never heard of, don't know much about, they get everything is tribal and so forth. And from the UN's point of view, this was sort of

the immediate period after the end of the Cold War, where it was really trying to get at sea legs and how it could make a difference. And one of the ways it was going to make a difference was peacekeeping. And they just had this mission gone really badly in Somalia. And now you have Rwanda and people are saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're not going to really put our troops at risk and jeopardize another UN mission. So a kind of risk aversion on the part of international actors. And so those who could have made a difference in Rwanda in that initial period, essentially the decision was, let's get our foreign nationals out. Let's draw down the peacekeeping force to a minimal number that we

can protect. And let's just not have anything to do with the situation, right? So they ignored warning signs of genocide. Then as the genocide begins, rather than framing it as a genocide, they framed it as tribalism. And their reaction was, we want no part because we're getting out. And out they went, right? And one of the internal dynamics of that that's important to note is the force commander, Romeo Dallaire, was pleading with New York, with headquarters in the UN, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, was pleading with New York, with headquarters in the UN, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, I want to stop this thing. I have a plan.

I need 5,000 troops. I think I can save a lot of people here. Maybe he couldn't have saved everyone. I don't think anyone would have said that. But I would say, realistically, half the population could have been saved. So that's somewhere around 250,000 human beings or 300,000 human beings, depending on how many you think died in the genocide. In any case, my point is that there was a local peacekeeping operation in place with the force commander who wanted to act, who instead of being allowed to do that,

essentially his own force was neutralized. And so that was a kind of green light to the radicals in Rwanda. It was a huge failed, missed opportunity to try to stop a genocide that could have been stopped. This was a modern genocide. It took place through the state, through things like the radio, through things like propaganda and so forth. But it was not a hugely sophisticated one in terms of the weapons that were used to carry it out. This was often household tools like machetes or sometimes spears and rocks, of course, guns and grenades. Many people, I think, call it a preventable genocide, and I agree. And rather than trying to do that. The Global North really walked away. The UN walked away and let Rwanda to its fate, and its fate was genocide.

What about the perpetrators being brought to justice? This is something you hear in Cambodia and Rwanda, the pain of victims who feel that they've never adequately had justice served. What is the situation with those who were in leadership roles in the Rwandan genocide? those who were in leadership roles in the Rwandan genocide. Yeah, so Rwanda had this enormous experiment in justice, in criminal justice. So it took place at different levels. First of all, an international criminal justice system. This was a UN tribunal that was paired to the one in Yugoslavia.

It was called the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. And the idea here was that they were going to prosecute the so-called big fish, the people most responsible, the prime minister, the ministers, the equivalent of governors, in some cases mayors, the leaders of the militia, people high up in the military. Those who were most responsible. And that court, in fact, has some extremely landmark and important decisions, in particular, a military trial, that is those who were the kind of radicals in the military who were seen to have been pushing a lot of the violence, those who were also in government, and those who were involved in the media, as we talked about earlier, those who were involved in the militia, etc. Very expensive, very distant from the Rwandan population. It took

place in another country. It took place in Arusha, Tanzania, but in some ways, extremely important for some of the decisions and some of the jurisprudence that came out of that, and for the historical record that came out of those trials. Then inside Rwanda, you have a situation where you had hundreds of thousands of Rwandans, ordinary Rwandans, who took part either directly or indirectly in the violence in the sense that they were either part of these bands of men who went out and killed, or they were indirectly involved in the sense they were providing information, or they may have stole things after people were killed. And Rwanda initially tried to use their domestic courts to prosecute those who had been arrested.

And they found that the domestic courts were too slow and a little bit, I would say, alien, like the presentation of evidence and lawyers and so forth. It was very slow and very, and I would say, alien inside of Rwanda. And so the Rwandan government decided to essentially revamp an existing system of justice, a kind of domestic justice or informal justice process called gacaca, which had previously been meant to settle disputes around property boundaries, or if an animal had encroached on someone else's land, or other kinds of lower-level disputes that could be settled within the community, and take this idea and extend it to genocide. And ultimately, for about a decade, there were weekly sessions all across Rwanda at the community level called Kachacha,

where alleged perpetrators who had been arrested or accused would be called up. They would ask for witnesses or those who had information, and they would be tried in these open air courts. And ultimately, there were around a million people who were brought through the Gachacha process and accused of genocide crimes. So it's an enormous experiment in transitional justice. So it was very, very extensive in that sense. I mean, part of your question had to do with how survivors feel. And I think anyone who survived the violence was deeply traumatized. I think feels a tremendous amount of fear and insecurity.

Clearly, you had perpetrators, people who took part in this violence who were living side by side in these communities. And of course, that creates all kinds of anxiety and a sense of disturbance. So I guess what I'm saying is that if you're a survivor, in some ways, it's very difficult to get over what happened, period, no matter what the justice process is. But of course, there's a lot of variance. Some people were happy to see those who were accused found guilty and so forth. But for others, I think there's no way to repair the loss in different ways. And one other thing I want to just quickly say about justice, it's also important to note about

the Rwandan story. And we've talked entirely about genocide crimes, this state-led systematic effort to destroy the Tutsi population that claimed 75% of the Tutsi population at the time. But there also was violence that the rebels committed, that the Rwandan Patriotic Front committed, both as they were securing Rwanda, as they were winning the war, then in the immediate aftermath, and then in subsequent years. And as you may know, the current government is accused of human rights violations. And it's important just to note that the justice process didn't allow any room for accountability for those crimes. So it was an enormous investment in justice for the genocide crimes, but very much a kind of one-sided justice. And the crimes that were committed by the rebels, which were not on the same scale, but nonetheless, for those who suffered from them, they were extremely significant. There was not accountability and justice. And I think for understanding contemporary Rwanda, it's important to begin

to also flesh out some of those dynamics too. How have you been able to build a life here in the UK, a happy life with relationships after everything you've been through? You just learn to live with it because I want to be alive. So I'm alive. And do I suffer at some point? I think, oh, why am I feeling anxiety? Why am I feeling low? But thank God, I am a happy person by nature. after that i'm still that person who will smile and laugh and but um i describe it as a shadow it's a shadow that works with you you see to sit with you you stand it stands with you but then the worst part done is when you're

seeing it's repeating and the repetition is not far. It's not far from where you are now. But I am in the UK. I have my two children. I have two beautiful children. I have a home. I live. I have a job. But how about the other people outside?

How about this? You know, we're seeing all this thing happening. But how do we rebuild when things are continuing like that? How do I rebuild when I'm hearing denialism? How do I rebuild when I'm hearing denialism, let alone, you know, how do you rebuild when the people who committed genocide are living in the UK, not facing justice? So I always try to understand people that I'm not the only one that made a good friend with the Holocaust survivors.

I see what they have been through. So basically the way I learned to live with it is to be grateful for what I have is to be thankful that I'm alive there's nothing else that's how I live with it basically it's a very powerful answer and I imagine having your own children gives you something to be grateful for and something to live for as well yes very good I have a soon 18 year old daughter whom I love so much and I've got a five-year-old daughter whom I love so much, and I've got a five-year-old son whom I adore. So they push me to want to leave because I keep saying to myself, I might be here today, I might not be there tomorrow. Because obviously with the past, you learn to live in the moment. You learn to live today.

Can I ask, in the UK, we're arguing, as you know, about language around immigration and the way that we characterize people coming in small boats across the channel. As someone who's been through genocide and seen a society torn apart, what for you are the important things that we should be thinking about? How can we make ourselves stronger and stop even the first steps on the path towards the things that you've lived through? Oh, the power of words. Words create everything, especially when the words are spoken by people, dignities, you know, the politician and the priest and anything because people hold them high within society. If we can stay silent, we are also empowering

those who are planning bad stuff. If we say words, so basically what we need to do is we don't need to be silent, but we need to speak up in the right way. Not in a way that encourages other people to do the wrong

stuff. Very moving indeed. Very powerful. Very moving indeed. Very powerful. You're welcome. Thank you so much to Beata Uwazaninka and Dr. Scott Strauss for coming on the show and helping us make sense of what's an incredibly complicated

and harrowing part of modern history. Thank you very much for listening. If you want more useful episodes that unpack and make sense of the events that have shaped our world, be sure to hit follow wherever you get your podcasts. Goodbye. you