The Rwanda Crisis

The enormous crowd of at least 300,000 was a mixture of all sorts and conditions: dispirited Interahamwe, who no longer even bothered to kill the few Tutsi walking along with them, civil servants and their families, riding in a motley of commandeered vehicles that had belonged to their ministries, ordinary peasants fleeing in blind terror, exhausted FAR troops trying to keep a minimum of discipline, abandoned children with swollen feet, middle class Kigali businessmen in their overloaded cars, whole orphanages, priests, nuns and madmen.”

Gerard Prunier describing the exodus from Ruhengeri. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide 1959-1994 at page 298, published by Hurst and Company Ltd, 1995.

Flight from Rwanda

The genocide in Rwanda claimed the lives of nearly a million people in 100 days in 1994, as extremist members of the Hutu majority turned on the Tutsi minority and moderate Hutus, vowing to exterminate the Tutsi and their influence on Rwandan society. The horror was only halted when the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) finally defeated the genocidal government.

In the wake of this violence, over two million refugees streamed into Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). 850,000 people walked across the border to Goma in eastern Zaire over just five days from July 14 to 18, 1994. Most were innocent Hutu fleeing the advancing RPF forces. Some had heard of human rights abuses committed by the RPF. Others fled out of fear inspired by Hutu Power propaganda describing the Tutsi as a “subhuman” race bent on enslaving and massacring the Hutu masses.

However, concealed among those clamoring for support were individuals who had been involved in massacre and killing—even in planning and carrying out the genocide. Groups intent on prolonging the violence saw the camps and the humanitarian aid that came with them as vital for the restocking of and recruitment for their war effort. The genocidaires quickly took control of the camps. Instead of finding safety in flight, the refugees continued to struggle against violence and intimidation while the genocidaires, operating with impunity, used the camps to rearm and launch forays back into Rwanda. Humanitarian organizations were forced to either deliver aid to the hands of the genocidaires or abandon hundreds of thousands of refugees to potential starvation. (For more on the Refugee Program’s efforts to address the dilemmas faced by humanitarian workers, see Refugees, Humanitarianism and Human Rights.

Insecurity in the Camps

The Rwanda crisis forced the international community to acknowledge the extent to which insufficient response to refugee crises could pose a threat to international peace and security. The magnitude of the crisis, combined with the saturation coverage it received on European and North American television, exposed the inadequacy of the international community’s responses in ways that other crises had not. Furthermore, its timing coincided with a renewed commitment by the international community to bring the most serious criminals to justice, starkly highlighting their failure to do so in the immediate aftermath of Rwanda.

It was clear that the international community was unprepared to respond to the crisis—both in dealing with singling out and bringing to justice the genocidaires and in assisting host countries in providing effective security. Many organizations, including Human Rights First, called on international actors to identify and separate those responsible for the genocide and the destruction of the civilian and humanitarian nature of the camps. Unfortunately, there was little political will to undertake such an exercise.

In the face of the international community’s inaction the genocidaires continued to use the camps as bases for incursions into Rwanda and attacks on elements of the local population. Eventually the new Rwandan government and its Zairian allies attacked and destroyed the camps claiming that they could no longer tolerate the threat the camps posed to Rwandan security. Thousands of refugees were killed. 640,000 Rwandans trekked home, while others, including some of the genocidaires, fled deeper into the jungles of Zaire.

The destruction of the camps in Zaire dramatically demonstrated the dire consequences of the failure to maintain security in refugee camps. One of the mechanisms could have been applied it an effort to prevent this disaster was the international refugee law concept of exclusion.