ABSTRACT
The genocide that consumed the tiny Central African country of Rwanda from April to July 1994 was in some ways without precedent. Despite noble pledges of “Never Again” following the Jewish Holocaust, the international community stood by while a million defenseless victims died. Under Belgian rule and afterwards, both Tutsis and Hutus were indoctrinated with this Hamitic hypothesis. Throughout the 1960s, remaining Rwandan Tutsis established a modus vivendi with the new Hutu-dominated order. Propaganda and militia killings reached a peak precisely when the Habyarimana regime was being pressured to respect its 1990 pledge to implement multiparty democracy and seek peace with the RPF. The mass atrocities inflicted mostly by Rwandan RPA soldiers against Rwandan Hutu refugees in 1996-1997 are intensively little-studied, if such a thing is possible. Since the Rwandan holocaust of 1994, a brazenly denialist discourse has sought to counter the overwhelming evidence of the “Hutu Power” regime’s systematic genocide of the Tutsi civilian population.
