The Challenge

During the course of just 100 days in 1994, over 800,000 people were killed in the Rwandan Genocide, which left even more people displaced, a country in ruins, and nearly 1.2 million children orphaned. These children were not only robbed of their families, of their homes, and of their communities, but also of their hope for a viable future. The ASYV aims to be a solution to the challenge of healing these traumatized youth.

Land of a thousand hills

A small landlocked country in sub-Saharan Africa, Rwanda is approximately the size of the state of Maryland. With approximately 9 million people, it has about the same population as New York City and is the mostly densely populated country in Africa. Known as the "land of a thousand hills," Rwanda has a stunning natural beauty. With its mild temperatures and lush vegetation, it is no wonder that a traditional Rwanda saying insists that "God goes elsewhere during the day, but at night he returns to his home in Rwanda." It was against this backdrop of natural beauty that decades of political and ethnic tensions led to one of the bloodiest mass killings in modern history.

Historical context

Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, political or cultural group. An understanding of the Rwanda Genocide requires some context. There are three ethnic groups who call Rwanda home: the Twa (making up less than 1% of the population) are the earliest known inhabitants who were mainly pygmy hunter-gatherers; the Hutu (about 85% of the population) were historically agricultural and pastoralist migrants from the west, who are believed to have settled in Rwanda some 2,000 years ago; and the Tutsi (about 15% of the population), who were historically cattle-owning people who are believed to have come to Rwanda from Ethiopia in the 15th Century.

Yet among these groups, there was really only one culture. As the author Philip Gourevitch notes in this book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, "Hutus and Tutsis spoke the same language, followed the same religion, intermarried, and lived intermingled, without territorial distinctions, on the same hills, sharing the same social and political culture in small chiefdoms…Through marriage and clientage, Hutus could become hereditary Tutsis, and Tutsis could become hereditary Hutus. Because of all this mixing, ethnographers and historians have lately come to agree that Hutus and Tutsis cannot properly be called distinct ethnic groups."

Impact of colonialism

Beginning in the late 19th Century, Germany ruled Rwanda as a colony, until 1918 when it was mandated to Belgium. Belgium authorities pitted what they perceived to be distinct ethnic groups within the country against each other, granting more power and prestige to the minority Tutsis, whom they deemed superior to and more refined than the majority Hutus.

To help facilitate this segregation of the population to meet their colonial needs, in 1933-34, the Belgians conducted a census in order to issue national ID cards based on "ethnicity," making it "virtually impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis," according to Guerovitch. "Whatever Hutu and Tutsi identity may have stood for in the pre-colonial state no longer mattered; the Belgians had made "ethnicity" the defining feature of Rwandan existence…with every schoolchild reared in the doctrine of racial superiority and inferiority, the idea of a collective national identity was steadily laid to waste."

In 1959, the Hutus overthrew the ruling Tutsi king. Over the next several years, thousands of Tutsis were killed, and some 150,000 were driven into exile in neighboring countries. By 1962, Belgium, like many European colonial powers in Africa, granted independence to Rwanda, leaving the Hutus in power amid lingering ethnic tensions.

A planned slaughter

After years living in exile in neighboring countries, in 1990 a group of Tutsis formed a rebel group called the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and began a civil war with Rwanda’s Hutu government. By 1993, a power-sharing peace agreement was reached, but Hutu extremists rejected this and called for the elimination of all Tutsis. Ethnic tensions continued to rise and the genocide was planned. On April 6, 1994, the Hutu President’s plane was shot down by still-unknown forces. This incident was the spark that started the genocide; within an hour roadblocks were set up in the capital city of Kigali and the killings began. Over the course of the next three months, "genocidaires" systematically killed Tutsis as well as moderate Hutus. The perpetrators included not only Hutu military and militia groups known as the "interhawme," but also ordinary Hutu citizens wielding machetes, who were encouraged by radio broadcasts to "cut down the cockroaches" and kill their Tutsi neighbors.

The genocide came to an end not when the global community intervened, but when Tutsi rebel forces were able to overpower the Hutu regime and take over the country. Approximately 2 million Hutu refugees - many fearing Tutsi retribution – fled to neighboring countries. Since then, most of the refugees have returned to Rwanda, but several thousand remain in the neighboring Congo and have formed an extremist insurgency bent on retaking Rwanda, much as the RPF tried in 1990.

Signs of hope

The first post-genocide presidential and legislative elections were held in 2003, and now Rwanda is generally considered to be a stabilizing country.