by Anne Brodgesell

Created on: March 16, 2009   Last Updated: September 17, 2009

Edmund Burke said "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing". By many accounts, this is one of the principal "causes" of the genocide in Rwanda. At a time when the only thing standing between the Tutsi and death was a continuing foreign presence, representatives of France, Belgium and the U.S. were packing their bags and withdrawing from the area. What has been termed International indifference was in essence, sentencing over a million unprotected, innocent souls to mutilation, rape and death.

Setting the Stage for Conflict

Rwanda was part of German East Africa from 1894 until the end of World War I. Belgian colonists arrived after World War 1 and ruled Rwanda through Tutsi monarchs. The Belgians regarded the Tutsi as superior to the Hutu and for two decades the Tutsi were provided with better jobs and education than their Hutu counterparts. This engendered a resentful inferiority complex in the Hutu population. To add insult to injury, in 1933-34 the Belgians instituted an identity card system identifying the "ethnicity" of every person. Any man with 10 cows or more were Tutsi and those with less than 10 were Hutu. In future generations, a person's ethnicity was determined by their fathers, regardless of their mother's ethnicity.

Until the mid-nineteenth century, the Tutsi and Hutu lived together fairly peacefully. They lived in the same areas, intermarried, spoke the same language and observed many of the same traditions. Rwanda's total population at this time was less than 2 million. The Hutu were the farmers and Tutsi raised cattle. It seemed a good partnership.

In 1959, Hutu resentment of the Tutsi had come to a breaking point. There were a series of riots and more than 20,000 Tutsi were killed. Many Tutsi fled to Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda leaving land and livestock which was taken over by the Hutus. On July 1, 1962 the Belgians relinquished their power and Rwanda became independent. The Hutu took over and between December, 1963 and January, 1964 all Tutsi politicians were murdered. From this point on, the Tutsi became the scapegoats for any real or imagined woe.

In 1961, under the supervision of the UN, Gregoire Kayibanda was elected president-designate of Rwanda. In July 1973, Major Juvenal Habyarimana staged a coup and declared himself president of the Second Republic. Over the next few years, he eliminated Kayibanda and his supporters. Rwanda became a dictatorship. Tutsi were segregated in the private sector, identity

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