Hours after President Juvénal Habyarimana's plane was shot down on April 6, militias and soldiers erected roadblocks across Kigali and began systematic killing. Radio Mille Collines broadcast dehumanizing propaganda urging Hutus to attack their Tutsi neighbors, and the violence spread from the capital to the countryside within days, overwhelming a UN peacekeeping mission too small and constrained to intervene.
The killing began with lists. Government officials and militia leaders had spent months compiling names of Tutsi and moderate Hutu opponents, and within hours of Habyarimana's assassination they moved from house to house with machetes and clubs. Roadblocks sprang up on every major road in Kigali, manned by young men demanding identity cards that listed ethnicity.
What followed over roughly one hundred days was one of the fastest mass killings of the twentieth century, faster even than the Nazi extermination camps in terms of daily death rate. Neighbors killed neighbors. Priests betrayed parishioners hiding in churches. The UN force commanded by Canadian general Roméo Dallaire had barely 2,500 troops and a mandate too weak to stop the slaughter, and most Western nations, still scarred by Somalia, withdrew rather than reinforced.
The genocide only ended when the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, advancing from Uganda, seized Kigali in July. The catastrophe reshaped international law around the responsibility to protect and haunts UN peacekeeping doctrine to this day.