In Rwanda, a small but populous country in Africa, a ghastly genocide started on April 6, 1994. Although it lasted only one hundred days, almost a million people were slaughtered by its end. This illuminating resource reviews one of the most horrible genocides in history, explaining the definition of genocide itself. Readers will learn about Rwanda's history, with a focus on the events that led to those terrible days. The book is rounded out with a brief look at post-genocide Rwanda, as the country copes and the people take back their lives after such a terrible tragedy.

The Rwandan genocide was one of the most shameful events of the 20th century. Many Westerners' understanding of it is based upon the Oscar-winning film Hotel Rwanda and the critically acclaimed Shooting Dogs. Yet how accurately do these films depict events in Rwanda in 1994? Drawing on new scholarship, this collection of essays explores a variety of feature films and documentaries about the genocide to understand its expression in both Western and Rwandan cinema. Interviews with filmmakers are featured, including journalist Steve Bradshaw (BBC's Panorama), director Nick Hughes (100 Days), director Lee Isaac Chung (Munyurangabo) and Rwandan filmmakers Eric Kabera and Kivu Ruhorahoza.

This volume provides a brief overview of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, and then explores major factors that caused it, political corruption, and the repercussions of the violence. It offers a multinational perspective on the controversies surrounding the genocide, the current implications, and long-lasting effects. Personal narratives are included that will captivate your readers, giving them first-hand accounts of those who lived through it or were directly impacted by it.

Victimisation of women in times of war, genocide or mass slaughter has been the primary focus of the majority of explorations concerning gender and conflict. Traditionally, women are espoused as victims, at the mercy of male killers, and therefore subordinate. The notoriety of brutal, horrific, and incomprehensible sexual crimes against women in times of genocide has ensured that reluctance in addressing female accountability has plagued this debate. While examinations of these atrocities are imperative and indispensable in facilitating reconciliation, both psychological and social, this one-sided representation has led to a misunderstanding of the dynamic roles which women play during genocide. Whether supportive, active or auxiliary roles, women have been a vital component in endorsing, and sanctioning genocidal violence in history. In Rwanda, some women not only provided assistance and encouragement to Hutu men but, also perpetrated the attacks, and incited rape. The suffering of female victims cannot be fully understood without a consideration of the extensive nature of the perpetrators, both male and female. Moreover, quite the opposite of diminishing the value and significance of the victimisation of women, any examination which focuses on female agency re-balances the scales of gender inequality, and consequently serves to empower women. Women should not be portrayed solely as victims. Women in the Rwandan genocide were victims and perpetrators, agents and symbols. Gender expectations which propagate the superiority of men, both during and after conflict are detrimental to the reconstruction of post-genocide gender identities.

Britain’s Hidden Role in the Rwandan Genocide examines the role of the United Kingdom as a global elite bystander to the crime of genocide, and its complicity, in violation of international criminal laws during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. As prevailing accounts confine themselves to the role and actions of the United States and the United Nations, the full picture of Rwanda’s genocide has yet to be revealed. Hazel Cameron demonstrates that it is the unravelling of the criminal role and actions of the British that illuminates a more detailed answer to the question of ‘why’ the genocide in Rwanda occurred. In this book, she provides a systematic and detailed analysis of the policies of the British Government towards civil unrest in Rwanda throughout the 1990s that culminated in genocide. Utilising documentary evidence obtained as a result of Freedom of Information requests to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as well as material obtained through extensive interviews - with British government cabinet members, diplomats, Ambassadors to the United Nations Security Council, prisoners in Rwanda convicted of being leaders and organisers of genocide, and victims and survivors of genocide in Rwanda – the author finds that the actions of the British and French governments, both before and during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, were disassociated from human rights norms. It is suggested herein that the decision-making of the Major government during the period of 1990 – 1994 was for the advancement of the interrelated goals of maintaining power status and ensuring economic interests in key areas of Africa. This account of the legal culpability of the powerful within the corridors of government, in both London and Paris, shows that these behaviours cannot be conceptualised under existing notions of state crime. This book serves to illuminate the inadequacies and limitations of a concept of state crime in international law as it currently stands, and will be of considerable interest to anyone concerned with the misuse of state power.

Throughout the 1990s, humanitarian interventionism sat at a crossroads, where ideas about rights and duties within and beyond borders collided with an international reality of civil conflict where the most basic human rights were violated in the most brutal manner. This growing awareness of humanitarian crises has been enabled by a more globalized media which increasingly shapes public perceptions of distant crises, public opinion, and political decision-making. Clarke examines the extent to which the public discourse, and particular concepts, including those of an ethical and legal nature, influenced British newspaper coverage of the 1994 crisis in Rwanda, and, in turn, the extent to which that coverage influenced the British Parliament’s response to the crisis. Through his development and application of a broader methodological approach that combines both quantitative and qualitative analyses, the book offers a fuller understanding of the relationship between media coverage, parliamentary debate, and policy formulation, and the central role that the globalized media plays in this process. Integrating ethics, law and empirical analysis of the media to obtain a more cohesive understanding of the chemistry of the media-public policy nexus, this work will be of interest to graduates and scholars in a range of areas, including Genocide Studies, the Responsibility to Protect, the Media & Politics and International Relations.

This important reference work offers students an accessible overview of the Rwandan Genocide, with more than 100 detailed articles by leading scholars on an array of topics and themes and 20 key primary source documents. Tracing the history of Rwanda prior to, during, and after German and Belgian colonization of Rwanda through the present day, this invaluable resource scrutinizes the historical events that determined how and why the Rwandan Genocide occurred and discusses the memory, history, and legacy of the atrocity both within and outside of Rwanda. Designed to suit the needs of students both new to and advanced in the subject, this reference work provides readers with a thematic overview of the Rwandan Genocide, an accessible analysis of the national and international complexities that drove it, and more than 100 in-depth entries on topics related to the genocide. Encyclopedic entries profile key perpetrators, rescuers, and witnesses as well as religious, political, and nonprofit groups, which, in combination with entries on judicial proceedings and the United Nations, offer readers a multifaceted understanding of Rwanda, the genocide, and its aftermath. To help learners to engage with the historical and social contexts of this atrocity, the book also contains 20 curated primary source documents and six perspective essays, in which scholars debate key questions regarding the genocide.

Abstract: To examine the impact of Rwanda's 1994 genocide on children's schooling, the authors combine two cross-sectional household surveys collected before and after the genocide. The identification strategy uses pre-war data to control for an age group's baseline schooling and exploits variation across provinces in the intensity of killings and which children's cohorts were school-aged when exposed to the war. The findings show a strong negative impact of the genocide on schooling, with exposed children completing one-half year less education representing an 18.3 percent decline. The effect is robust to including control variables, alternative sources for genocide intensity, and an instrumental variables strategy.

This book provides a juridical, sociopolitical history of the evolution of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Over one million citizens were massacred in less than 100 days via a highly organized, efficiently executed genocide throughout the tiny country of Rwanda. While genocide is not a unique phenomenon in modern times, a genocide like Rwanda’s is unique. Unlike most genocides, wherein a government plans and executes mass murder of a targeted portion of its population, asking merely that the majority population look the other way, or at most, provide no harbor to the targeted population (ex: Germany), the Rwandan government relied heavily on the civilian population to not only politically support, but actively engage in the acts of genocide committed over the 100 days throughout the spring of 1994. This book seeks to understand why and how the Rwandan genocide occurred. It analyzes the colonial roots of modern Rwandan government and the development of the political “state of exception” created in Rwanda that ultimately allowed the sovereign to dehumanize the minority Tutsi population and execute the most efficient genocide in modern history.

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Politics - Topic: Public International Law and Human Rights, grade: A-, , course: Law, language: English, abstract: The atrocities that occurred in Rwanda have been the issue of the international community for some time now. Books have been written about the evils of the genocide that occurred there. Scholars have had their share of debates and arguments about the issue. Newspapers, government reports and human right organizations have made it their headlines in different events. But after all that has been unfolded in Rwanda, all that was left was over 100,000 suspects and more than a million dead corpses. The government of Rwanda had to devise a system to deal with all those suspects, thus bringing forward a traditional conflict resolving mechanism called the Gacaca tribunals. These tribunals were established in every community and were mandated to address genocide related issues and deal with the suspects. They were also established on the belief that they would bring about transitional justice and reconciliation within the society. These and other factors aside, the tribunals were often criticized for lacking the proper due process aspects of dealing with suspects. The main focus of the paper is to discuss thoroughly these issues and analyze the tribunals on this basis.