By mid-April 1994, the genocide launched after President Habyarimana's assassination on April 6 was killing thousands of Tutsi and moderate Hutu civilians daily across Rwanda, with machete-wielding militias operating through roadblocks nationwide. International peacekeepers, hampered by a limited UN mandate, largely could not intervene, and the death toll during this period climbed toward what would total roughly 800,000 by July.
By this point in April, the killing had taken on horrifying organization: local radio stations broadcast lists of targets and instructions, while roadblocks manned by militia checked identity cards for ethnicity, killing those marked Tutsi on the spot. Entire families were wiped out in churches and schools where they had sought shelter, betrayed by neighbors turned killers.
The UN Security Council, scarred by the Somalia intervention's failure months earlier, actually voted in April to reduce its peacekeeping force in Rwanda rather than reinforce it, despite pleas from force commander Roméo Dallaire, who had warned Washington and UN headquarters that a small, well-mandated force could stop the killing. The genocide would continue for roughly one hundred days, ending only when Paul Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front seized the capital, Kigali, in July. The world's failure to act became a defining case study in the doctrine of humanitarian intervention that followed.
Key people: Paul Kagame