Dr. Peter Holmes, co-author of Christ Walks Where Evil Reigned: Responding to the Rwandan Genocide, talks about the book’s subject.
Unlike most of the terrible slaughter in the Great Lakes regions of Central East Africa, the Rwandan genocide was between two vocational groups, people who spoke the same language and lived in the same village. The Tutsi were the herdsmen who owned the cattle, the Hutu the farmers who worked the land. Just like Cain and Abel. They developed a profoundly deep hatred and jealousy for each other that were fed by the colonial strategy of dividing the natives in order to use them to control one another.
10,000 people were slaughtered every day for 100 days. Around a half million women were infected by AIDS intentionally by men who had infected themselves for that purpose. Several hundred thousand children were maimed or left alive without parents.
One of the biggest tragedies of the Rwandan genocide was that the UN ignored it, as did the American and European governments. Much of the communication from the country was from the official government which was ruled by the Hutus who were leading the genocide.
[It] did not occur like an army sweeping through the country but was instead made up of neighbors who were Hutu or Hutu–sympathizers who were jealous of the person next to them because they had more cows, or more wealth. Jealousy, hate, and even a fear of over-population helped birth the explosive slaughter. Continue reading Christ Walks in Rwanda