Section A: Plan of investigation (168 words)
How successful have post-genocide efforts at reconciliation been in Rwanda?
The 1994 Rwandan genocide had left nearly one million people dead. Inevitably, after such extreme violence, coming to terms with the past is emotionally scarring and becomes a major challenge for a society like Rwanda to reconcile.
The aim of this investigation is to find out how successful these post-genocide efforts have been in reconciling the Tutsis and the Hutus. This investigation will emphasise on one type of reconciliation effort - the Gacaca. This research focuses on the role of the Gacaca courts, the perceptions of different divisions of people towards the Gacaca courts and how these efforts have been significant
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The purpose of the thesis paper is to describe how the Gacaca functions and to illustrate the effectiveness of reconciliation through the effects resulting from the Gacaca. The value of this source lies in its unbiased stand about the reconciliation efforts in Rwanda. It does not dwell into the investigation of which party is to blame but rather how the Gacaca has impacted the lives of survivors. it is also valuable in the sense that it is transparent in measuring the success of the Gacaca - through the adopted concept of reconciliation. Its limitation lies in its origin. Since this source was published in 2005, only 4 years after the implementation of the Gacaca, the findings that the research was based on can be seen as an impartial view. Reconciliation is a long and slow process and hence takes generations before any major progress is able to take place. Therefore, it lacks reliability as the results and conclusion portrayed in this thesis paper is only based on the initial phase of the …show more content…
Tutsi people regard the Hutus who have been released from the Gacaca Courts, despite carrying out the decided punishment, as being “killers”. Thus, from a justice point of view, the reconciliation efforts are unsuccessful. This feeling of betrayal by the justice system also fosters a sense of paranoia in the Tutsi community as they will not know if the Hutu community will strike again. This ultimately affects the peace and healing process in Rwanda as victims cannot forget the crimes committed against
C. Introduction The Rwandan genocide lasted three months and in those three months it is said that 1 million Tutsis were killed. The Holocaust lasted 4 years and 6 million Jews were killed. Bearing this in mind it would be expected that The Rwandan genocide should be extremely well known because of the loss of lives, impact and brutality of the event and the similarities it holds with The Holocaust. The fact is that the Rwandan Genocide is not very well known and is not thought to be in the same category as The Holocaust, where in fact it is.
When the international community responded indifferently toward the Rwandan genocide, “labeling it an ‘internal conflict’,” as the U.S. Holocaust Museum states, perpetrators could commit those genocidal crimes with little constraint; this directly led to the genocide later in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “Adding fuel to [the Congo’s] unstable mix, some one million refugees, mostly the Hutu fearing the… Tutsis, fled into [the Congo]… at the end of the Rwandan genocide” and before the first war of the Congo. Additionally, leaders of that genocide followed, and “Organizing themselves in the fertile grounds of the massive refugee camps in Eastern Congo,... [they] began preying on the local Congolese population and making incursions back into Rwanda” (The U.S. Holocaust Museum 1).
No, the shooting down of President Habyarimana’s plane did not initiate the genocide but rather, the genocide was affected by the deep rooted tensions between two groups who inhabited Rwanda, the Hutu’s and the Tutsi’s. These two groups had gone through a long period of power struggles which will be explored throughout this essay. Showing that the genocide did not occur as a result of one assassination. “It is buried too deep in grudges, under an accumulation of misunderstandings...’ . Although it is argued that the plane crash did indeed initiate the genocide and that the genocide was merely a reaction to the plane crash.
The American Government 's Response to The Rwandan Genocide The United States often have an had interest in the political, social and civil crises of other countries in order to benefit themselves. American senior officials hid the truth of the Rwanda Genocide to avoid public moral obligation. The government did not give any financial or political support to the country because Rwanda did not offer minerals or political advantages and stability; the US ' government did not want to be involved in another conflict, even though it has helped other countries in the past.1 But what is truly deeper hidden, are the stories of people like Immacule, a young girl, who, unlike thousands of others, survived the catastrophic genocide in Rwanda.
It was like no one cared about millions of people getting slaughtered. After WWII people has said never again. Well it happened again, no one did anything about it. For that the US and UN should have at least said some kind of sorry. President at the time, Bill Clinton, actually went to Rwanda to apologize.
Terry George aims no less than to demonstrate the Rwandese reality through the extremely violent and cruel scenes in the movie, he manages to convince the audience that really, over 800,000 people were in fact killed in no more than 100 days and more than 2 million refugees had to seek shelter elsewhere in the world (1). To begin with, it is important to understand the root causes of the conflict between Tutsis and Hutus to in turn understand the genocide demonstrated in the movie. Rwanda was
“An in-depth analysis on effects of Imperialism on Rwanda” Nowadays, European countries such as England, France, Germany, Belgium, and many other countries possess a colossal clout throughout the world. It is an impeccable fact that such countries, indeed, have served as a rudiment pivot and step for the world to be advanced to the point where we are since the Industrial Revolution. Such countries, because of it, without a doubt, have a crucial status globally and become the superpower and commercial hub on our planet. On the back side of their gleaming growth, however, there is an invisible part left behind their luminous development: the Imperialism. The term “Imperialism” refers to a policy of extending a country’s authority and political clout by using its military forces and diplomacy.
Finally in July, the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front), a group of Tutsi trying to stop it, captured the town Kigali, and the government collapsed (“Rwanda: How the Genocide Happened-BBC News”). When it was obvious that
The Rwandan genocide vs. the Holocaust “Genocide is an attempt to exterminate a people, not to alter their behavior.” Jack Schwartz. Genocide is mass murder, it happens in all parts of the world. A common known genocide is the Holocaust. Where a group known as the“Nazis” (lead by Hitler) murdered more than six million people (many were Jewish).
On the basis of these observations, the missionaries, who first arrived in 1900, formed their ideas about the Rwandan population, developed their missionary strategy, and inspired the political colonial regime that created the administrative structures in the twentieth century. This interpretation of Rwandan society by explorers and missionaries corresponds remarkably well to the popular local mythology found by missionaries, in whom the Tutsi are pictured as excellent, clever, and brilliant, the Hutu as lazy and inattentive, and the Twa as the official jokers. The Hutu majority were seen as native Rwandans, and the Tutsi minority were seen as nonnatives, and thus as intruders. This thinking has also been decisive in identifying Hutu and Tutsi over the course of time in the 1950s, extremist political parties, both Hutu and Tutsi, have explicitly referred to this historical ‘origin’ of Rwandan society. Because the use of racial
After the genocide, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), political party in Rwanda, established a union with a Hutu president and a Tutsi vice president. The United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) provided peace process and relief in the aftermath of genocide between Hutus and Tutsis. United to End Genocide describes how twenty-six percent of the population in Rwanda still suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. “In 1994, the United Nations created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), dedicated to bringing those responsible for the genocide to justice” (United to End
When the Rwanda genocide began in 1994, its population stood at more that 7 people. Roughly 85% of the population was Hutu, 14% Tutsi, and 1% Twa (un.org). The decades following Rwanda’s independence from Belgium in 1962 saw growing ethnic tensions and periodic violent attacks and reprisals between Rwanda’s Hutu majority and its Tutsi minority. On April 6, 1994, the deaths of the Presidents of Burundi and Rwanda in a plane crash caused by a rocket attack, ignited several weeks of intense and systematic massacres.
This made large divides between the two cultures and later many civil conflicts between the groups. In 1994 when the president 's plane was shot down the government and Hutu militants blamed the Tutsis, radio broadcasts across the country encourages Hutus to take revenge and kill the Tutsis, in the end an estimated 800000 to 1 million people died. The globalization of Belgians colony and the scramble for africa through that part of the world into a blood conflict of cultures and terrorist/militant groups that still rages on
One cannot fight fire with fire. While massacre reigns in Rwanda and people take betrayal to the extreme, Paul Rusesabagina in his book, An Ordinary Man, proofs how violence is unnecessary while standing against the power of the word. As Rusesabagina states, words are “powerful tools of life”(Rusesabagina, 19). The war between the two different ethnic groups, Hutus and Tutsis, and the death of thousands left a mark Rwanda’s memory; the author says: “It is the darkest bead on our national necklace” (222). Even though a large part of Rwanda’s population is massacred, many are saved by one of Rwanda’s timeless heroes.
This shows that many people in Rwanda died from diseases and some died from being targeted during the genocide. This evidence is significant because it shows the population decrease in Rwanda and also shows the negative impact of genocide in Rwanda. This genocide impacted the history of Rwanda and also the people in