"Stories from Rwanda" a Rwanda Travel Page by husain

Before the genocide occurred in 1994, Rwanda was often referred to as 'a tropical Switzerland in the heart of Africa', and also as `Le pays de Mille Collines' (Land of a Thousand Hills).

The 100 days of killings, that started in early April, 1994, left Rwanda as synonymous with strife, violence and bloodshed - if you followed the news bulletins ten years ago, and then again- on the tenth anniversary of the genocide.
Rwanda was in the news, but not on the agenda. A responsibility that the world refused to accept and an apology that it has ended up becoming ever since...

Between April and June 1994, within the space of a hundred days, almost a million Rwandans, almost ten percent of the entire population, were killed.

Most of the dead were Tutsis and most of those that killed were from the from the majority Hutu community. Some moderate Hutus were killed as well, in what is referred to as `the fastest genocide in history'. The speed of the killing was five times greater than that which the Nazis achieved at the height of the Holocaust. Some 1,000,000 people were murdered in less than three months.

The international community did its best not call it genocide, since labelling it as such would impose a legal obligation on the world to try to stop it. Instead, `acts of genocide' was the phrase that was coined, to refer to what was happening in Rwanda.