“We wish to inform you that we have

heard that tomorrow we will be

killed with our families.”

Unit objectives• Identify significant people and terms related to the Rwandan

genocide of 1994 and its preceding history.

• Establish causation: Discuss the proximate and ultimate causes of the Rwandan genocide.

• Analyze Genocide by examining its ten stages, and apply your understanding of Rwanda’s conflict to each of the ten stages.

• Evaluate culpability: Deliberate the extent to which different groups/individuals bear responsibility for the genocide, citing aggravating and mitigating circumstances.

• Synthesize an understanding of justice by examining the punitive and restorative responses to genocide within Rwanda in the years since 1994.

GENOCIDEo the systematic extermination,

or attempted extermination,

of an entire racial, ethnic,

religious, or national group

Germany, 1945

Rwanda, 1994

Over the course of 100 days in the Spring

and Summer of 1994 extremist members of

Rwanda’s ethnic majority Hutu population

began a genocide to cleanse the country of

the ethnic minority Tutsi population.

CRISIS

“I don’t know why others want to kill

Tutsis. We have lived together for so

long as neighbors and friends. It’s

unbelievable seeing your neighbor hacked

to death. These people are saying they

want to create a new Rwanda. How can you

do that by killing neighbors and friends?”

- Chrisostome Gatunzi (Hutu)

“It was as if we were taken

over by Satan. When Satan is

using you, you lose your mind.

We were not ourselves. You

couldn’t be normal and you

start butchering people for no

reason. We’d been attacked by

the devil.”