by James Lutaaya

Created on: June 09, 2008   Last Updated: August 13, 2008

COULD THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE HAVE BEEN STOPPED?

Many a Rwandan identifies with James Choice's thoughts when he says; 'history is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake' as the ethnic conflicts that have besieged this beautiful mono-tribal country date way back before the majority of its population was born. How a small nation of about seven million at the time of genocide could generate enough hatred for its own kin to massacre a tenth of them will for whatever justification bewilder many an officious by stander. My focus is not going to be on the general politically correct perspective of accusing either ethnicity for the atrocities as the truth is in most instances an elusive scarcity in matters of political debate. For instance, it is illogical that the majority Hutu killed more Tutsis and still lost the war. At the time of the genocide, Rwanda had a population of approximately seven million comprising of about 700,000 Tutsis, the death toll was between 500,000-1,000,000 people and many were killed around Kigali. If the genocide was a deliberate attempt to exterminate the Tutsi ethnicity, and the death toll was close to a million with fewer Hutu deaths; the presumption is that the Tutsi ethnicity should have been extinct by now. The reality is this was an ethnic nationality war that concluded with the superiority of the Tutsi army being the determinant for victory. Both ethnicities lost as many lives and fled Rwanda to Zaire, Tanzania, Malawi and Swaziland mainly in equal numbers. Refugees from both ethnicities were escaping the consequences of military combat and continued their extermination of each other in their refugee camps until logic prevailed.

Most genocides are characterized by the unilateral control of media used to dehumanize the persecuted and disenfranchised through appeals to ethnic nationalism. This was no exception to the Rwandan genocide. The media was used greatly to enrage Rwandans through inciting ethnic discrimination. Although much of this was used by Hutus, the Tutsis also used the media for their benefit in exonerating themselves from the genocide. For instance, the Voice of America set up a special Kinyarwanda Broadcast reporting the Tutsi side of the Rwanda crisis and the Hutus were never given an opportunity to give their side of the story. Now that we have realized that whatever happened can not be reversed and Rwanda is rightly reconciling and growing as one, we need to assess whether this genocide could have been stopped.

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