Foto of the victim of the genocide taken inside the Genocide Memorial in Kigali
Between April and July 1994, within 100 days, approximately 1.000.000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed, while the world stood by and watched - hacked to death with machetes or other farm tools, strangled, drowned in septic tanks, palled, shot, buried alive or killed by methods beyond imagination. The Hutu militia was openly supported by the Rwandan army. The few UN soldiers there were forced to watch and the international community was busy defining if the mass killings were “acts of genocide” or indeed “genocide”.
Those three months of killing and murder were actually only the ultimate climax in a long lasting conflict that roots in colonial times. In pre-colonial times, the terms Hutus and Tutsis were used to describe social classes: the pastoralist Tutsis on the one hand and the Hutu peasants on the other.