In the last piece in the series, we realised that rather than addressing the socio-economic issues inherited from the colonialists and the First Republic, the new regime continued dividing Rwandans by ethnicity, enforcing the continued persecution and discrimination of the Tutsi.

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This environment of continuous persecution, hatred, divisionism, forced exile and loss of national values led to the Genocide against the Tutsi in 1994. The next pieces will explain more about what happened and the consequences.

In Rwanda, between April and July 1994, there was a terrible Genocide in which more than one million people lost their lives.

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Since 1994, the Genocide perpetrated against the Tutsis has been a subject of numerous studies and publications. Some authors have made an effort to reconstitute the event with sufficient precision, while others have focused on analysing the causes of this genocide. In this perspective, the ethnic trap and hatred propaganda perpetrated by the media have been rigorously studied and sufficiently analysed.

Through their reports, international organisations have undertaken to retrace the steps that were taken in the preparation and execution of this genocide. In the meantime, individuals have provided oral testimonies of the events. In addition to the testimonies, there are investigations that were carried out; some were done by the Belgian Senate. Others were done by the French Parliamentary commission, the United Nations (UN), the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), as well as symposia and seminar reports.

A national commission was constituted to collect evidence with the view of exposing the implication of France in the genocide. Furthermore, a report on the investigation of causes, circumstances and the persons who were responsible for the attack on the Rwandese presidential aircraft was published. The information on the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi was further enriched by witness accounts given to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) as well as the Gacaca courts.

Through these mass publications, it is worth noting that explaining the details of this genocide calls for conditions that are extremely difficult to establish. Among such conditions, the following are outstanding: the capacity to resist foreign influence while carrying out studies, knowledge of methodological debates and established facts, differences in interpretation and constant worry to reach a synthesis of the events during the genocide.

There was abundant literature available, yet the process of explaining the genocide that was committed against the Tutsi faced numerous obstacles. Some of these obstacles are of epistemological (how we come to know things) character, while others are connected with foreign stakes. How can the Genocide perpetrated against the Tutsis be understood and how can it be explained? The nature of this question presupposes that nothing should be taken for granted. Studies carried out on genocide in other countries show the need to question the genesis of the crimes, the factors that made it possible to carry out the genocide with efficiency and least opposition as well as the structure and strategies that were deployed to carry out the genocide.

By investigating all the above phenomena, it becomes possible to understand and explain how so many people were killed and how other people became organised killers. To this key question, several others are added to obtain some clarification, especially on the meaning that the executioners gave to their commitment to the genocide.

Relying on written and oral sources, this chapter therefore seeks to propose an introductory appraisal of the main factors that make it possible to understand the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi as will be realised in the next chapter.