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Rwanda On The Rebound After 1994 Genocide

Rwanda On The Rebound After 1994 Genocide

From Radio New Zealand

The Rwandan High Commissioner has told Saturday Morning how his country has become reconciled to the 1994 genocide. Charles Murigande said it was working because it has to work.

On 6 April, twenty years ago, a plane carrying the presidents of the African states of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down above Kigali airport in Rwanda.

Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana was a member of the ruling Hutu majority, who have a tense relationship with the Tutsi minority, going back to Belgian colonisation in 1916, and the riots in 1959 that led to ongoing conflict.

The president’s death sparked a genocide. Over the next hundred days, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed, around 20 percent of the country’s population. Most of the killers were Hutu, and most of their victims were Tutsi.

 

Read more at Radio New Zealand