Although I had seen war before, had seen the face of cruelty, Rwanda belonged in a nightmare zone where my capacity to understand, much less rationalize, was overwhelmed. This was a country of of corpses and orphans and terrible absences. This was where the spirit withered.
- Fergal Keane, 'Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey'

On the 6th of April, 1994, Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down, and crashed into the grounds of the presidential palace. One hundred days later, over a million people were dead, murdered by their neighbours. The international community failed to act, and even refused at first to describe the slaughter as 'genocide', despite evidence that the violence was deliberately designed to wipe out a specific ethnic group.

The western media can be very selective about stories from Africa. It's part of a vicious circle - western audiences often don't have the background information to understand anything too subtle, so for stories to be headline news, they mostly have to be dramatic and violent - the 1984 Ethiopian famine or the violence between the African National Congress and the Inkatha Freedom Party in South Africa are good examples. In the west, there was an impression that the Rwandan genocide was simply two tribes at war, as a result of old feuds we could not possibly comprehend. In actual fact, the underlying causes of the violence were much closer to home.

A short history of Rwanda

Rwanda is a fairly small country in central Africa, around a tenth of the size of mainland Britain. It's bordered by

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