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Introduction to Rwandan Genocide

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Scientific Poster – Genocide Rwanda 1994
Introduction:
“The international community didn’t give one damn for Rwandans because Rwanda was a country of no strategic importance” – these are the words General Romeo Dallaire, Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission For Rwanda (UNAMIR) used to describe the reaction and failure of the international community to the Rwandan Civil War and the genocide which erased roughly one tenth of the Rwandan population. Often described as one of the fastest, most brutal genocide in the history of mankind, it is nowadays also seen as one of the biggest, if not the biggest, failure of the UN to act according to what they obliged themselves to in paragraph one of article one of the UN charter.
With this scientific analysis we aim at researching the (re-)actions of the UN and the incentives and motives that lead to them in order to explain how and why such a tragic event could happen under the eyes of the international community. However, to reconstruct how the civil war started one has to see the events in a historical context that dates back to the beginning of the 20th century.
After possession of the colony Rwanda has been given to Belgium in the aftermath of World War I, the Rwandan population, until then peacefully living and working together, has been divided into “races” based on physical characteristics. This has been institutionalized by giving out different ID cards to “label” the status. Supremacy and the right to hold about 95% (Porter 2011) of all leadership positions was given to the “Tutsi”, due to their rather Caucasian-looking skin tone. “Hutu” accounted for about 90% of the population, and as an effect of the preferential treatment that the Tutsi enjoyed, Hutus had a rather low living standard and was seen as the “working part of the population”. Access to education was only given to Tutsis. In 1962,

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