Some 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda's genocide in just 100 days
Between April and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days.
Most of the dead were Tutsis - and most of those who perpetrated the violence were Hutus.
Even for a country with such a turbulent
history as Rwanda, the scale and speed of the slaughter left its people reeling.
The genocide was sparked by the death of the Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, when his plane was shot down above Kigali airport on 6 April 1994.
A French judge has blamed current Rwandan President, Paul Kagame - at the time the leader of a Tutsi rebel group - and some of his close associates for carrying out the rocket attack.
Mr Kagame vehemently denies this and says it was the work of Hutu extremists, in order to provide a pretext to carry out their well-laid plans to exterminate the Tutsi community.
Whoever was responsible, within hours a campaign of violence spread from the capital [...]
Who are the BBC? The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters are at Broadcasting House in Westminster, London and it is the world's oldest national broadcasting organisation and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees. It employs over
What is a Genocide? Genocide is intentional action to destroy a people. People are defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group in whole or in part. The hybrid word "genocide" is a combination of the Greek word genos ("race, people") and the Latin suffix -cide ("act of killing"). The United Nations
Genocide Convention, which was established in 1948, defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group". The Political Instability Task Force estimated that, between 1956 and 2016, a total of forty-three genocides took place, causing the death of about 50 million people. The UNHCR estimated that a further 50 million had been displaced by such episodes of violence up to 2008.
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The Holocaust is a specific instance of genocide. It refers specifically to the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jewish people by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.
Where is Rwanda? The Rwandan genocide occurred between 7 April and 15 July 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War. During this period of around 100 days, members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu, were slaughtered by armed militias. The most widely accepted scholarly estimates are around
800,000 to 1,000,000 Tutsi deaths. The Hutu and Tutsi adhere essentially to the same religious beliefs, which include forms of animism and Christianity.
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