Genocide

Geno, or race, combined with Cide, Or killing.  The term was coined in 1954 to categorize mass killings based on ethnicity. It was in response to the holocaust  in Germany which killed over 6 million but has been applied to several tragedies in the last century.  

The 1994 genocide is always just below the surface when you are in Rwanda. Visibly, there are memorials all throughout the country where the dead in that area have been reburied.   Less visibly though is that the racial hatred that caused it in the first place is not gone.  How could it be?  Less than a generation ago the 80 percent majority Hutus killed almost a million of the minority Tutsis.  And did so mostly in really brutal machete attacks on men, women and children right in the open.  They were earnestly trying to exterminate the Tutsis.  The only thing that stopped the killing was the Tutsi rebel army which invaded. 

Today the country is trying very hard to overcome the tragedy and the hatred that spawned it.  The government is officially mixed.   A very large number of genocidaires have been brought to justice in war crimes trials. And no one, Tutsi or Hutu that we met openly talked of anything other than that the only option was forgiveness.