Rwanda Genocide Dbq Essay Example

After the Holocaust, the world had promised that they would “never again let anything like this happen.” In the spring of 1994, all hell broke loose as one million people died in the Rwandan Genocide. What happened to the promise to never let another genocide occur again Racism, competition of land between Hutu and Tutsi, and denying the situation in Rwanda as genocide, the killings occurred and continued for 100 long days. However, that all happened because of European colonization in Africa. Doc 1, by Gerard Prunier, states how the Belgians divided Rwanda people based on physical features. Doc 2, by Jared Diamond, shows the population density of Rwanda compared to the rest of the world. Lastly, Doc 3 was a press briefing explaining how and why the U.S. did not use the word ‘genocide’. One of the factors that allowed the genocide to begin was racism, which evolved from European colonization. In 1925, Belgian people began to classify the Rwandan people in pre-existing groups: Hutus and Tutsi. These divisions were bias and stereotypical, however, because they were made upon their physical features. On top of that, the Belgians favored the Tutsi because they looked more like them. “The Mututsi of good race has nothing of the Negro, apart from his color.” [Doc 1] The imperial favoritism contributed to tensions between the Hutus and Tutsis. For example, the Tutsi were given I.D. cards, which were used to identify them. The I.D. cards gave them more and better land for farming, and more rights then the Hutus were given. Also, educational privileges and governmental jobs were reserved solely for the Tutsis. The favoritism towards the Tutsis angered the Hutus, which began the mass killing of Tutsis. In the years before the genocide, the Rwandans were practically living on top each other. The population density (population/sq km) as compared to the rest of the world is 6 times larger, the world’s population being 45.1 and Rwanda 293.3 [Doc 2]. Evidently, Rwanda was