The Rwandan Genocide Begins

A City at Dawn

It might have sounded like thunder—the low, shaking rumble overhead as darkness settled on Kigali the night of April 6, 1994. But the noise was not made by the weather. As the presidential plane dropped out of the sky, shattered by missiles in the blue-black dusk, its fiery trail marked the beginning of the end for Rwanda as millions had known it.

By sunrise, the city breathed a different air. Kigali’s usual morning hum had fallen eerily quiet—a silence punctuated by the shuffle of hurried footsteps and the distant squawk of radios crackling with news that felt both incredible and inevitable. On the street, someone had abandoned a bicycle mid-ride; a woman gathered her children near a shuttered shop. Already, rumors galloped ahead of the sun: our president is dead, the government is lost, everything will change now.

Seeds of Hatred

Rwanda’s story is not simple. It is not only about ethnic difference, nor only about power, nor only about fear, but all of these elements wound tightly over a century. The country is small—about the size of Maryland, tucked into the green hills and red earth of Central Africa—but crowded with memory.

Under Belgian colonial rule, lines had been drawn, first with ruler and pen, then with identity cards: Tutsi, favored for government jobs and education; Hutu, the majority largely excluded. The Belgians counted skull shapes, measured noses, and divided a society already complex. Resentment festered. When independence arrived in 1962, the balance of power flipped. Now Hutu leaders claimed the machinery of state, and waves of violence sent thousands of Tutsi fleeing for their lives—families that would remember, organize, and eventually return.

By the 1990s, Rwanda was a land under pressure. The Rwandan Patriotic Front, an armed rebel group made up of Tutsi exiles, was pressing in from Uganda. Inside the capital, promises of peace—hammered out in the Arusha Accords—were fragile as glass, already cracking under the strain of propaganda and whispered threats. Radio stations, especially the infamous RTLM, spat venom around the clock: Tutsi are cockroaches. They are enemies. Lists of names circulated, black ink mapping out who should live and who should not.

In the months before April, men in training camps learned to swing machetes and fire rifles. The government’s civilian militias, the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi, grew bold. On city corners, the UN’s blue-helmeted peacekeepers looked on, their orders clear: observe, but do not intervene.

A Night of Broken Barriers

The missile strike that killed President Habyarimana—alongside Burundi’s president Cyprien Ntaryamira—did not just kill men; it broke whatever held Rwanda back from the abyss. By midnight, the calculations had changed.

The first targets were those who might have stopped the violence. Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, known for her moderate voice, was among the first to die. Her house, ringed with Belgian UN peacekeepers, became a point of bitter confrontation; those ten soldiers, instructed to protect her, were overrun and executed. The message was clear: no one was safe, and no outsider would stand in the way.

In homes throughout Kigali, radios picked up orders: “It’s time. Do your work.” Some families hid, others ran. In the streets, men with lists began to knock on doors. Roadblocks sprang up where there had been none the day before. “ID, please.” A question that, for thousands of Tutsi and suspected sympathizers, was a death sentence.

The Killing Begins

April 7, 1994, dawned sullen and gray, heavy with the knowledge of what was coming. The first waves of violence unfurled like something rehearsed: house-to-house searches, machetes and rifles distributed. Tutsi—neighbors, shopkeepers, teachers—were dragged into courtyards and killed. Some Hutu—those who objected, or married Tutsi, or simply asked why—were murdered too.

The city’s churches, once sanctuaries, became slaughterhouses. People rushed to them, hoping that even killers would spare the sacred. But sanctity offered no protection: in Nyarubuye and Nyamata, thousands died in pews and courtyards, sometimes at the hand of priests or nuns, their fear drowned by the roar of mobs.

Word spread fast, not by government bulletins but by shrieked warnings and the drumbeat of RTLM radio. “Do your job.” “Eradicate the inyenzi.” Children learned that certain words in the air could swallow you whole.

Across the Hills, the Land Shrinks

The killing was not confined to Kigali. Within days, violence raced along Rwanda’s winding roads and dusty paths. Villages that had been quiet went up in flames. Survival became a question of luck, or of who you could bribe, or whose mercy you might buy. For too many, mercy would not arrive.

Hutu militias hunted the forests and the fields, armed with lists, weapons, and impunity. Tutsi who tried to flee found themselves funneled into stadiums, schools, and parishes—sites intended as havens, quickly twisted into traps. Some victims tried to hide in marshes and pit latrines or beneath the beds of friends. But neighbors knew neighbors. Secrets bled into the open air.

In the chaos, some Hutu—at their peril—sheltered Tutsi friends, defying the genocidal tide. The cost, often, was their own lives.

Outside Looking In

Beyond Rwanda’s borders, the world watched and reasoned and hesitated. Western governments evacuated their nationals, filling airplanes and closing embassies. The United Nations, hamstrung by reluctance to call this catastrophe “genocide,” not only failed to bolster its small peacekeeping force, but actually drew down troops as the killing crescendoed.

Ambassador Kofi Annan, then head of UN peacekeeping, received telegrams from General Roméo Dallaire, commander of UNAMIR in Rwanda: “Something terrible is underway.” Politicians weighed words. Papers described “tribal violence,” not state-orchestrated murder.

To those hiding in the hills, suffering was neither abstract nor distant; it was a pounding at the door, a scream from the street, the choking smoke of burning homes.

The Endless Days

For nearly one hundred days, the killing did not stop. RTLM radio, wielded as a weapon, fanned hatred into inferno. Children were turned into orphans overnight. Women and girls, subject to unspeakable violence, bore scars the world would never fully see. Entire families were erased, their names surviving only in lists compiled after the fact.

The economy, already fragile, collapsed. Crops wilted unharvested. Government offices stood empty, looted by the same men who orchestrated slaughter. Across the border, streams of refugees—more than two million, mostly Hutu fearing revenge—spilled into Zaire and Tanzania, turning tragedy into a regional crisis.

The RPF Advances

As the governing regime deepened its campaign to eliminate the Tutsi, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by Paul Kagame, launched its own final offensive. Village by village, city by city, the RPF fought its way across Rwanda, with all the inevitable cost that war brings.

By early July, RPF forces entered Kigali. The city, once teeming with life, was littered with bodies, its markets and offices emptied of hope. The genocide did not stop all at once—in some regions, the killing continued even as the new order set in—but by mid-July, the organized slaughter had largely ended.

Aftermath: A Changed Country

What was left behind defied comprehension. Between 500,000 and one million people dead—over 70% of the Tutsi population. Hundreds of thousands more lived with wounds, both seen and unseen. A quarter-million women raped. Orphans wandered streets where their families had vanished.

Villages, towns, entire communities were leveled. The infrastructure of the state no longer functioned, its coffers plundered by those who had orchestrated death. GDP plunged. With Rwanda’s core gutted, some asked how there could be anything at all to rebuild.

Justice became a new arena. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda set up courts in Arusha, Tanzania, to prosecute the top architects of genocide. Inside Rwanda, Gacaca—community courts—wrestled with the question of accountability for thousands of lower-level suspects. Some found a measure of closure. Others found only more pain.

The World Responds—Too Late

In the aftermath, apologies came—in some cases, years too late. The UN re-examined its peacekeeping failures, eventually embracing, on paper, a doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect.” France and Belgium investigated their own roles in the crisis, sometimes admitting complicity or negligence, sometimes still deflecting blame. Researchers and survivors alike pored through the record, reconstructing decisions day by day, asking again why the world’s most powerful nations had stood aside.

What Endures

Today, Rwanda is a country remade in many ways—a leader in economic recovery, lauded for its reconciliation efforts and, at times, criticized for political repression. Laws ban the ethnic labels that once were mandatory, but memory is harder to legislate away.

The genocide’s lessons are taught in classrooms and marked in memorials, but trauma lingers. Some wounds close, others cannot. Every year in April, sirens sound in Kigali: a nation remembers.

Perhaps the last word belongs not to politicians or scholars, but to the survivors—those who endured loss beyond words and those who, by telling their stories, insist that the world not forget what was allowed to happen when hatred, history, and inaction conspired to destroy a people.

“If you knew me, and you really knew yourself, you would not have killed me.” — Inscription at the Kigali Genocide Memorial