The Rwanda Genocide

In one of our English classes, while we were talking about human rights, we were introduced to a slaughter that took place in Rwanda, a country situated in central-east Africa.

This bloodbath occurred between April and June 1994, which resulted in near a million deaths. Although it was a shocking event that forever changed all of Africa, the rest of the world turned a blind eye.

So how come a conflict of this magnitude went unnoticed?

The two main ethnic groups in Rwanda, the Hutus and the Tutsis were led to see each other as enemies by German colonists who separated them based on height. However, the episode that kicked off the civil war was the murder of the Tutsi President Habyarimana by Hutu rebels.

This catastrophe should make us feel ashamed, not because of the war crimes that were committed but because most of us didn’t even know it happened.

The media seems to praise celebrities, events, scandals, among other (insignificant) things and it will continue to idolize this mentality unless we shift our focus to important issues. If something of this scale were to happen in the USA the globe would fall apart. The masses would raise monuments to honor the lives that were lost and it would be made history.

But it didn’t happen in the USA, it happened in Africa and due to that we treated this genocide almost like something that wasn’t really important.

Be honest with yourself, you knew about 11th September, but did you know about Rwanda Genocide?

Written by Filipa Melo, Diogo Moutinho and David Reis