In April 1994 the world was flooded by grisly images of piles of murdered men, women, and children from Rwanda. Some of the bodies were discovered in mass graves, some in churches and schools that had become catacombs for the victims, and some floating along rivers and rotting in lakes. The slaughter was so extensive that the bodies threatened to clog the rivers and pollute the lakes. It soon became clear that the world community was once more confronted with genocide. Indeed, what happened in Rwanda was no limited massacre or even what the United Nations calls a “genocidein-part.” This was the real thing: more than a half-million Tutsi murdered – three-quarters of the population – and the attempt by the Rwandan state and the Hutu majority to exterminate every last Tutsi. Like the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide the destruction in Rwanda fits the category of “total domestic genocide,” what the UN calls a “genocide-in-whole.” My aim in this chapter is to demystify the Rwandan genocide and to see it clearly as an instance of state-sponsored mass murder driven by ideology in a context of revolution and war that has been a hallmark of our modern era.

In my previous work on the origins of modern genocide I emphasized the role that factors like revolution and war played in creating situations or contexts favorable to a policy of genocide and class destruction.