One Day in April 1994
When the genocide started on 7 April 1994, the Rwandan people were plunged into an unimaginable nightmare, yet the world turned its back. Acting on the orders of political leaders bent on exploiting ethnicity as a way of hanging on to power, militias went out to every part of the country and systematically massacred defenceless people, both Tutsis and moderate Hutu political opponents of the regime. Even though the appalling scale of the killing was evident, the UN and the international community did nothing.
High hopes had been raised in December 1993, when the UNAMIR international peacekeeping force was dispatched to Rwanda to safeguard the transition from dictatorship to peace and democracy. These hopes were betrayed, however, in April 1994: the international response to the crisis was withdrawal in the face of genocide.