Jewish Holocaust and Rwandan Genocide, War of Races
“For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: His duty is to bear witness for the dead and the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive, to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time. The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future.” Elie Wiesel, Night, Prefacr to the New Translation (New York: Hill and Wang. c2006), page xv.
Genocides have been part mankind’s history for a very long time. One of the most known genocides is the Holocaust, which took place between 1935 and 1945. Its main objective was to eradicate Jews from the territories controlled by the Third Reich. As well as the Holocaust, Rwandan genocide is one of the most intensive mass-exterminations seen on the 20th century; it has its origins on race conflict between to ethnic groups of the African country: The Hutus and the Tutsis.
The Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide will be compared in this essay in order to show that prejudice is one of the major causes triggering mass-extermination, and how propaganda influences people in actively participating in such massacres.
Holocaust and Rwandan genocide:
Background:
The Holocaust was the planned, bureaucratic, state-sponsored annihilation of Jews by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The ideology of the Nazi movement –led by Adolf Hitler– was founded, from the beginning, on a hatred of Jews; Hitler’s adepts though supported the thought that Jews were an inferior race.
The Nazi movement started gaining popularity in 1932 and, by 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. When the German President died in 1934, Hitler took over his charge. With Hitler in the Presidency, the chasing of Jews and other so-called “inferior” races –all for the sake of the Aryan race– started officially.
One of the major events that marked the beginning of the Holocaust was the Kristallnacht, on November 9th, 1938. On this night, Nazis attacked Jewish citizens and their properties. In addition, the Nazis arrested at least 30,000 Jewish men; they were sent to concentration camps.
In September 1939, Nazis invaded Poland and the Jews that lived there were subjected to extreme violence. But it wasn’t until 1941, when the Germans invade the Soviet Union, that their genocidal hatred was fully released.
When Germany occupied these new territories, Hitler saw the opportunity to implement his “final solution” to the Jewish “problem” in Europe; the genocide had started and, by the end of this period, two out of every three European Jews had been killed (5 to 6 million people), including 1.5 million children.
One would think that, after a tragedy such as the Jewish massacre from World War II, mankind would have learned the lesson. However, it seems as if mankind liked to trip over the same stone more than once. Rwandan genocide happened 49 years later, between April and June 1994. It was one of the most intensive killing campaigns in human history; in only 100 days, an estimated of 800,000 Rwandans were killed.
The root of this conflict was ethnic tension. Rwanda had two major ethnic groups: Hutus and Tutsis. These groups have always had disagreements among them –issue that had grown largely since the colonial period – despite speaking the same language, living in the same areas and sharing the same traditions.
However, when the Belgians took over Rwanda after World War I, they saw Tutsis where taller, thinner and had more European characteristics. Thus, they were given the roles of responsibility, making the Hutus upset. It was also the Belgians who decided to implement an Identification card, where it must say which ethnical group the person belonged to. These cards were still being used after Rwanda’s independence, and they provided crucial information to the perpetrators of the genocide.
When Rwanda was fighting for its independency, Belgium switched the status of the two groups, giving the power to Hutus (the majority). This made Tutsis upset and the tension began. Some extremist Hutus murdered around 15,000 Tutsis between 1959 and 1962; this made more than 100,000 Tutsis flee to neighboring countries.
In 1973, the totalitarian regime of Juvenal Habyarimana was installed, and the Tutsis remaining in Rwanda were stripped of their wealth and social status. After 1986, Tustis living in Uganda formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) a guerrilla organization which main objective was to overthrow the President Habyarimana’s regime.
In 1990, the RPF launched the invasion, occupying zones of the northeast of the country. As consequence, in1993, Habyarimana accepted to sign a peace treaty that granted Tutsis a share of the political and military power. However, extremists Hutus were not fascinated with this idea, and did not accept the peace agreement. These extremist Hutus were the ones in charge of the genocide; they saw themselves as patriots defending their nation. For this group, moderated Hutus who supported the peace treaty also became a target. These people – the extremists – created the “Hutu Power” movement that led and supervised the Rwandan Genocide.
The Massacre:
The Nazis extermination campaign started, without a doubt, with the mass detentions and annihilation of male Jews during the early period of the Nazi Rule (1931-1941). These same strategies were used against women in later stages. Mass executions and the gas chambers knew nothing about gender or age. The Nazi party killed approximately tens of thousands Jews in the closing stages of the war.
The Reich developed a squad called Einsatzgruppen (death-squad); this group “trained” their officers through a step escalation of killing. First they shot only teen and adult men; this was done so they could “acclimate” to mass execution prior to killing women, children and elderly Jews. The idea of these mass shootings was to cleanse the conquered space from any manifestations of Jewry and Bolshevism. This led to the mass murder of Jews in mass shooting like Babi Yar -where 33,000 Jews were killed-, the gas-vans and the famous concentration camps.
On the concentration camps, women, children and the elderly were targeted for immediate extermination; while young boys and male adults were usually preserved and forced to work. They lived under the most precarious environment in the concentration camps, and most of them died of starvation or in the gas chambers.
On the other hand, Rwandan genocide started on April 6th, 1994, when a missile shot down President Habyarimana’s plane. Which group is accountable for this has never been confirmed, but studies suggest that the Hutu extremist decided to get rid of the President and implement a “final solution” to the Tustsi “problem”.
Within 24 hours of the death of the President, the Interahamwe –military part of the “Hutu Power” movement- blocked roads around the capital, asking everybody for their ID and separating Hutus from Tutsis. Tutsis were after killed by hand weapons such as machetes and knives; also, many taller Hutus were presumed to be Tutsis and were killed as well. Meanwhile, death-squads worked with list of Tutsis and moderate Hutus that needed to be assassinated; these lists included the Prime Minister.
Rapidly, the genocide expanded from the capital to the countryside and, by April 21st, around a quarter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus had been slaughtered. This, together with the World War II genocide, was the most concentrated act of genocide in human history.
As in the Holocaust, genocides targeted principally the men. Regarding women, the main strategies used in genocides were mutilation and rape. In later stages, genocides targeted the whole population; men, children and women were faced the same future, death.
Propaganda and media:
The Nazis has a weekly newspaper, Der Sturmer (The Attacker), at the bottom of the front-page it said: “The Jews are our misfortune”.
They also developed a series of books, board games, and brochures that advertised the danger of Jews to the Aryan community, along with speeches and regulations against Jews.
In regards to the Rwandan genocide, the Hutu extremists controlled a newspaper called Kangura. In December 1990, the paper published “The Ten Commandments for the Hutu” where they basically stated that any contact with Tutsis was treason to their race.
RML (Radio Television des Milles Collines) also spread hate. When the killing of Tutsis started, they took an active role in the genocide. RML announced the names of individuals that should be killed and where to find them.
How many people died?:
According to Raul Hilberg, “The Jewish dead numbered more than 5 million: about 3 million in killing centers and other camps, 1.4 millions in shooting operations, and more than 600,000 in ghettos” (Hilberg, “Holocaust”, Encarta Encyclopedia).
On the other hand, the number of people killed in Rwandan genocide has not been systematically assessed due to the chaotic nature of the event. However, in February 2002, the Rwandan government released the results of the first major census that allow estimating the number of people killed in the genocide. Approximately one-seventh of the population was killed (1,074,017 people) being the Tutsis a 94% of these victims.
General conclusions:
Both genocides are very similar, even when they were performed in different continents and involving different ethnical groups. The hatred between two races (German and Jews in the Holocaust and Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda) can be easily recognized, as well as the so-called solution of eradicating one of the groups.
The Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide used propaganda and media to influence people in taking participation in the genocide acts. Both Nazi’s and Hutu’s media displayed direct offensive messages about the other group.
History gives us many examples of genocides and killing, and most of them have the same reasons: Prejudice and irrational hate. Also, most of them could have been stopped on time if somebody from outside had act early, as the British historian Ian Kershaw wrote: “The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference”.
Written on September 6, 2011
randomwriter006 