[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Global Issue: Rwandan Crisis
It is difficult to overstate the scale or brutality of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Between 6 April and 17 July, the Rwandan state engaged in an act of mass carnage against its own population, targeting a minority ethnic group and political opponents. In a mere fourteen weeks, several hundred thousand people—perhaps as many as a million—were gunned down, beaten to death, or literally hacked to pieces by machete, often after being raped, tortured, and forced to watch or participate in the execution of family members. Apart from the killing, almost 4 million people were displaced from their homes—more than 50 percent of the prewar Rwandan population— with 2.3 million of those fleeing the country altogether. The result was the greatest humanitarian crisis of this generation.
The Rwandan genocide was horrific even by the standards of a century repeatedly marred by mass political and ethnic slaughters: of Armenians at the onset of the century; of Jews during World War II; of Cambodians at the height of the Cold War. In the final decade of the twentieth century, mass genocide found its most brutally efficient expression to date in Rwanda. In early April 1994, the Times of London carried a report about a development in a little-known war in Central Africa, reprinted here in its entirety: The leaders of Rwanda and Burundi were killed last night when their plane was shot down by a rocket, according to UN officials, as it approached the airport at the Rwandan capital of Kigali.
Behind this bare-bones report, one of modern history's most intensely violent acts was unfolding.Translating the numbers from the Rwandan horror into a Western context helps illustrate the scale of what occurred during those monstrous months. (Astri Suhrke, Bruce Jones 2000) The percentage of the Rwandan population killed in a single day of genocide exceeded by at least a factor of ten the percentage.....
