Rwandan genocide

The Rwandan genocide was a tragic event, and hopefully Paul Kagame will succeed in not letting this ever happen again. When we had the Rwandan debate in class I read a lot of articles about the genocide and Paul Kagame. I am disappointed in my country for not stepping in on this situation because they could have put an end to this by just sending in a couple of tanks. The U.N. was an embarrassment to the entire world for being scared of a couple of Africans with machetes, and not sending any more help even though they could. Juvenal Habyarimana played a big part in this for brainwashing the Interahamwe to kill their neighbors. He did this out of fear, but a smarter thing to do if you were scared would be to flee the country, which would look really bad, but millions would not have died. People like the Red Cross risked their lives to save some of the moderate Hutus and Tutsis without the help of any other countries or organizations.

My opinion on the genocide is that it was Juvenal and the Interahamwe's fault that the killing had started. Paul Kagame was just trying to save his fellow Tutsis, so I do not believe it is his fault because mostly Tutsis were killed and he is a Tutsi. The debate in class made me learn more about the genocide from different group's views. I saw that everyone including the ones who did most of the killing all thought that they were doing good, and no one admitted that it was their fault. The groups that were commonly blamed were the Interahamawe, Juvenal, UN, U.S, and Belgium.

The U.S. was blamed a lot because they never stepped in to stop this, when they could have done it quite easily. The Interahamawe were also commonly blamed because they were a group that killed many people, but their excuse was that they were brainwashed by Juvenal. The UN was blamed for the same reason the U.S. was. Last but not least was Belgium because they played a stereotypical role by favoring the Tutsis over the Hutus causing an even greater conflict between the two groups.

My group, Paul Kagame was not blamed for the genocide as frequently as the other groups, but we were blamed because we had went into Rwanda to kill all of the Hutu extremists and gain power over Rwanda. Our comeback was that mostly Tutsis were killed and Paul was a Tutsi, so he did not do as much as others did.