Rwanda Genocide Symbolism

The Rwandan Genocide was one of the world’s worst genocide ever that left several people without families, and brought a divide in the country between two ethnic groups, the Tutsi and the Hutu, and people are still dealing with the effects to this day. The main parties that acted in the Rwandan Genocide were the Hutu, the Tutsi, the United Nations, the United States, Belgium, France, and some neighboring countries of Rwanda were also involved. According to “Rwandan Genocide,” the cause of the genocide was the shooting down of the plane that the Rwandan president, who was Hutu, was on and no one survived (“Rwandan Genocide”). No one really knows who shot down the plane, but some people say allies of the president did it, so the Hutu would …show more content…
When killing the Tutsis the main weapon of choice for the Hutus was a machete. The symbolization of the machete was that it killed off the Hutus enemy. In “An African Holocaust,” Dean White states: “Unlike the Holocaust, the killings in Rwanda did not require ghettos, death camps or gas chambers. Instead victims were murdered with machetes, clubs or grenades and often by neighbors, friends, even by relatives” (White).
Groups were set up throughout Rwanda, and other countries to either kill the Tutsis, or try and stop the genocide. A group named Parmehutu, which was created by Hutus, started a revolution to take over the government and succeeded (“Rwanda Chronology”). Another Hutu led group was the Interahamwe who “are remembered today as the driving force of the genocide…” (Walker). In response to the Hutu groups, a Rwandan Patriotic Front, created by the Tutsi in 1985, was starting to fight against the Hutu (Walker). According to Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia, “Beginning in the 1990, a Uganda-based Tutsi-led rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), launched several attacks against the Hutu-led government” (“Rwandan Genocide”). These groups were classified by whether they were Tutsi or Hutu because they could not get along well with each other. All of these groups used aggressive methods of killing to try and …show more content…
The Hutus would kill the Tutsis any chance they got, and at any place. According to Luke Walker, “The Rwandan Genocide itself began with mass killings in Kigali, but over the course of its 100-day duration, killings spread to all corners of the country” (Walker). The mass killings started in April of 1994 in Kigali, which is the capital of Rwanda, and it spread out onward. According to Dean White, “Emboldened, Hutu formed political parties and began to exert their position as the country’s majority…” (White). Most of the international community had watched the genocide from the beginning, but they did not call it a genocide until much later (News, BBC). With all of the death tolls that came with the genocide people were in denial because those were their families that had