ABSTRACT
Unlike Afghanistan, where downfall started with foreign invasion and ended in anarchy, Rwanda was a country which repeated the same tragedy all over again. Poorly equipped and burdened with other, geopolitically more important, emergencies, aid agencies and the Western media hardly responded to the Rwandan crisis. Humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), still few in Rwanda, seemed to focus on development projects; the massacres were hardly mentioned in their reports. As a consequence, the Rwandan crisis received almost none of the limited relief funds which circulated in the humanitarian system and only a few aid agencies responded to it. In the 1950s, Rwandan political life became dangerously polarized, as the rising Hutu class turned the old myth upside-down, to the disadvantage of the Tutsis. Despite the severity of the crisis, the humanitarian response was just as limited as the theoretical views predicted. Some researchers hold that an important cause of the genocide was political and social repression within a jam-packed country.
