ABSTRACT
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees announced, with a horrifying accuracy made possible only by a well-planned genocide in which nonparticipants were able to play a spectator role, that 16,870 people had been killed in nine villages around Cyangugu, in the southwest. Despite the complicity and occasional involvement of the Rwandan army, as well as the organizational role played by Rwandan army officers in the genocide, most of the killers were civilians armed with machetes, knives, and clubs, against which a well-armed UN force could have been effective. The Rwandan Patriotic Front leadership saw the slaughter as an attempt by the ruling elite to retain power, as politically motivated, rather than having the purely ethnic motive of genocide. The Radio Libre des Mille Collines, created by the coalition pour la defense de la Republique militia when Radio Rwanda came to be regarded by the extremist tendencies as too liberal, broadcast from Kigali radio station throughout the genocide.
