I consider it the most horrible crime against humanity that has happened since the Holocaust.

The Rwandan genocide was caused by a power struggle between the two dominant tribes in both Rwanda and Burundi. The Hutu and the Tutsi. Traditionally they have not gotten along very well, the Tutsis, which is the minority in Rwanda, has ruled the country for many years and some radical Hutus resented this. Both sides have had sporadic bloody conflicts those two countries for decades after independance and a civil war between the two groups had been going on in the early 1990s. In 1994, the Hutu Rwandan president was killed when his plane exploded mid-flight. Some say that this was planned out by Hutu extremists to trigger a genocide, others say that the genocide was not planned but simply a impulsive, bloody reaction by the Hutus. Either way, Angry Hutus took advantage of this as a time to exterminate the Tutsi once and for all. However, one should note that the genocide was NOT started by a government of any sort. THERE was essentially no government at this time in Rwanda. The genocide was propagandized by extremist Hutus who called out the extermination of all Tutsis on radio stations and TV stations, and sadly, a lot of people listened to it and over the next three months more than 800,000 Tutsis were killed in the hands of their neighbors, mobs, and even friends.

Millions of Tutsis fled to the Congo during this time, Uganda or Burundi. And during this time a Civil War started. And fortunately, the Tutsis won. A Tutsi rebel group, the RPF began an offensive to win back Rwanda and they conquered the country thus making the Hutus along with people who commited the genocide flee into the Democratic Republic of Congo. Rwanda is now a democracy, though it is far from a well established, wealthy nation. And the scars from the genocide has not completely healed.