At Calhoun, genocide survivor urges tolerance, peace

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Habimana said his goal in speaking to students is to teach them to put a premium on human life above everything else. “You are in school, you are studying, and I believe some day you’re going to be important people,” Habimana said. “Some of you are going to be teachers, professors, the mayors, governors, who knows? … Maybe secretary-general of the United Nations.”

Marie Johnson, a junior in Goldberg’s class, said Habimana’s personal story was “intense” and “upsetting,” but it should be told. “We should be respectful towards each other,” she said.

Speaking after Habimana’s visit, Goldberg appeared optimistic about the future. He said that students’ interest in his and Rosslee’s elective class, which is now in its 10th year at Calhoun, shows “how today’s young people are involved in the world around them and how they can make a positive difference.”

Historical overview

In 1994, Rwandan government forces, government-backed militias and the country’s Hutu majority massacred hundreds of thousands of Tutsi men, women and children in about 100 days between April and July.

Hutus and Tutsis are African peoples who share a close cultural, religious, linguistic, geographical and genetic history. Originally, the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi was that between farmer and herdsman. It was the European colonialists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who defined Hutus and Tutsis as separate races and imposed a political and economic system that favored Tutsis. The legacy of this ethnic division has been decades of recriminations and cycles of violence that still persist across the region.

Hutu Power groups gained political and military clout in the early 1990s, and they began calling for and planning the extermination of the country’s entire Tutsi population. The April 1994 assassination of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, sparked the Rwandan Genocide, which ended when Paul Kagame, who is now president of Rwanda and then commanded a rebel army based in Uganda, captured control of Rwanda in July of that year. According to the United Nations, 800,000 people perished in the genocide, including moderate Hutus who refused to participate in the killing. Many died by machete.

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