Sunday, July 06, 2014

A nightmare with no way out

In just 100 days in 1994, some 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda by ethnic Hutu extremists targeting members of the minority Tutsi community as well as their political opponents. According to the Kigali Memorial Centre, the number was even higher, about one million dead. Either number makes the Rwandan genocide one of the swiftest mass killings in history, with an average of at least about 8,000 victims per day, its matches in the 20th Century including the mass murder, mostly by starvation, of Soviet prisoners of war in the custody of the German Wehrmacht between October 1941 and March 1942 (according to German historian Christian Gerlach, the number of Soviet prisoners who died is likely to have been around 300,000 to 500,000 in each of the months October, November and December 1941). The Gendercide Watch site's page Case Study:Genocide in Rwanda, 1994 includes the following comparison:
Together with the mass murder of Soviet prisoners-of-war during World War II, it was the most concentrated act of genocide in human history: "the dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust." (Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998], p. 3.) (Gérard Prunier provides an even higher estimate: "the daily killing rate was at least five times that of the Nazi death camps." Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide [Columbia University Press, 1995], p. 261.)