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The Three Stages Of The Rwandan Genocide

1107 Words5 Pages

Mateo Barrios
Mr. Moseley
Period 3
21 February 2023
Genocide Essay Title [Lead]. This is known as genocide, the mass killing of many people from a particular nation or ethnicity. This specific genocide was the Rwandan Genocide, where the primary victims were an ethnic group known as the Tutsi, who were being killed by another ethnic group known as the Hutu. This genocide occurred from April 7, 1994, to July 15, 1994, only around one hundred days, yet over 800,000 Tutsi were killed (Rwandan Genocide). Over decades, high tensions between the Tutsi and Hutu led to this mass genocide.
When Rwanda was under the control of Belgium, they gave the Tutsis more privileges than the Hutus, whom the Belgians viewed as …show more content…

The classification stage of genocide is when the perpetrators of the genocide or another power classify and put people into certain ethnic or religious groups to remove some common ground between people. This usually makes it easier for some of the other states of genocide to occur (Stanton). The Belgians did most of the work for this stage even before the Hutu extremists started planning. Belgium split the Rwandan population into three groups: the Hutu, the Tutsi, and the Twa, with the Tutsi and Twa being minorities and the Hutu being the majority. The Hutu and the Tutsi had tension between them because “the ruling Belgians favored the minority Tutsis, and gave them a range of advantages over the majority Hutus.” This made it easy for the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide as they did not need to do the classification stage themselves. Furthermore, the Belgians further split the ethnic groups by “requiring all Rwandans to carry identity cards that classified people by their ethnicity (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).” This …show more content…

The dehumanization stage of genocide is when the perpetrators of the genocide vilify the victims and dehumanize them (Stanton). The Hutu extremists vilify the Tutsi by blaming them for all of the pressures the country faced and blaming them for supporting the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a rebel group that was invading Rwanda. They dehumanized the Hutu by having a very popular Hutu radio station refer to the Tutsi as “subhuman,” “cockroaches,” and “vermin that needed to be eradicated.” Another way the Hutu extremist leaders painted the Tutsi as subhuman was by telling the Hutu citizens that “the Tutsis were planning a killing campaign against them (Donohue).” This was meant to plant the idea that the Tutsi were vicious and dangerous in the Hutu people, making them more inclined to believe that they needed to be eradicated. This dehumanization of the victim group makes it much easier for the polarization stage of genocide to

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