Rwandan Genocide

In 100 days from April to July 1994, an estimated 800,000 people — the vast majority of them Tutsi — were systematically murdered in Rwanda by Hutu extremist militias known as the Interahamwe, while Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines broadcast lists of targets and called Tutsi 'inyenzi' (cockroaches), turning neighbor against neighbor in one of history's fastest and most efficient acts of mass killing. The United Nations, despite warnings from its own commander General Roméo Dallaire and the pleas of survivors sheltering in churches and schools, voted to withdraw most of its peacekeeping force at the very peak of the slaughter, while Western governments deliberately avoided using the word 'genocide' to evade legal obligations to intervene. It was ultimately the Rwandan Patriotic Front — a Tutsi-led rebel army under the command of Paul Kagame — that ended the genocide by military force, capturing Kigali on July 4, 1994, and triggering a mass exodus of Hutu civilians and génocidaires into Zaire that would destabilize Central Africa for decades.