NOVANEWS
25 years have passed since the terrible massacre that bloodied Rwanda in 1994 . From 6 April to mid-July, for about 100 days, 800,000 to one million people were mercilessly slaughtered, according to estimates by Human Rights Watch , mostly women and children belonging to the Tutsi tribe , by members of the Hutu tribe. , which in Rwanda represents about 89% of the population. The massacre, carried out with firearms, machete pangas and studded sticks, was one of the most heinous of all time, but this was not enough to shake the international community, which did nothing to prevent it.
Rwanda is one of the poorest countries on earth, where the Hutu and Tutsi tribes have coexisted peacefully for centuries, until the arrival of European colonizers. At the beginning of the 1900s, first Germans and, subsequently, Belgians inserted the members of the Tutsi tribe, richer and more educated than the Hutus, in the colonial administration , and the inevitable consequence was a heated rivalry, exacerbated by the subsequent move of the Belgian colonial authorities, who drafted ‘ethnic identity cards’ with the result of closing groups that were not previously. When, in the late 1950s, the Tutsis waged a war for independence from the colonizers, the Belgians changed their strategy by financing and arming the Hutus.
The declaration of independence of Rwanda in 1959 does not bring peace. The civil war is more heated and bloody than ever and the massacres (in 1963, 1972 and 1973) follow one another and cause thousands of innocent victims on both sides. Compared to the previous ones, the 1994 massacre is characterized by a fierce and widespread hate campaign supported by the radio, the infamous ‘Radio television libre de milles collines’, which repeats the song ‘Iye tubatsembatsembe’ whose refrain reads: ” Exterminate them, exterminate them” . The victims are mostly Tutsi, but even moderate Hutus are murdered, with light weapons and deadly spiked sticks, which cause horrific injuries and cause death among atrocious suffering.
The slaughter officially ends on 4 July, with the late Turquoise operation, a mission led by the French under a UN mandate. And on the arms issue the Israeli government has been called into question. It appears that a large quantity of small arms (rifles, bullets and grenades) had departed from the Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv , and that then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres were fully aware of what was going on happening. The evidence has accumulated over the years, also documented by the Israelis who visited Rwanda during the massacre or soon after.
On November 8, 1994, the International Tribunal for Rwanda was established by the UN, which at least until now has called into question and punished only some of the material perpetrators but has not hit the real perpetrators, who remain unpunished today: those who provided weapons to the Hutu government and the media that fueled a shameful hate campaign.