Shortly after 8 pm on April 6, 1994, an explosion in the sky near Kigali, the Rwandan capital, unleashed horror. That day, a surface-to-air missile shot down the plane carrying the then presidents of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, and Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, both Hutus, 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 murdered a day, 333 every hour, five dead 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 bombing but by Hutu civilians, often armed with machetes or other farming tools. Blinded by a slow-cooked hatred from the political platform or the media, which called to “end the Tutsi cockroaches,” thousands of citizens went out to hunt people they often knew.
Everything happened in the face of international inaction. If the 2,500 UN blue helmets 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 Thursday that France could have done more to stop the horror in its former colony. Macron, who upon his arrival at the Elysée in 2017 promoted a commission to clarify the French role, will broadcast a video today on social networks in commemoration of the 30 years of what happened in which he regrets the inaction. “France, which could have stopped the genocide with the help of its Western or African allies, lacked the will to do so,” he notes. On a visit in 2021, Macron already admitted France's “responsibility.” Rwandan President Paul Kagame said those words meant turning a page in the relations between the two countries.
The United States did not avoid disaster either. Still in shock from the murder, months earlier, of his soldiers in the battle of Mogadishu, in Somalia, he did not want to risk a new image of American corpses on African soil. Former President Bill Clinton, who was then in office and will lead the American delegation to the commemoration events in Rwanda, later lamented 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 regret it,” he noted.
The brutality in Rwanda had consequences that still last today in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, where, in the face of the Tutsi counteroffensive commanded by Kagame, thousands of Hutus fled, including members of the Interahamwe militia, perpetrators of the worst atrocities. On Congolese soil, tens of thousands were massacred in revenge.
Thirty years later, the country has turned around. Dubbed the Switzerland of Africa, Rwanda is a modern, digitalized nation with high levels of literacy and parity in institutions. But the echo of the genocide continues: Kagame leads with an iron fist a country of whispers, where it is prohibited 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 achievement is its example of reconciliation. The popular singer and writer Gaël Faye, author of the novel Little Country, translated into 36 languages, recited an unpublished text yesterday: “Thirty years later, memory is still a burning ember. The wounds are still open and the pain resurfaces with each commemoration. But society has rebelled against all odds and has achieved the impossible: cohabitation between victims and executioners.”
