Abstract
On the 6th of April 1994, the plane carrying the President of Rwanda was shot down. Exactly this particular moment triggered an event that brought the death of at least more than half a million members of the Tutsi ethnic group. An event that became known to the world as Rwandan Genocide. Transferred into numbers, Rwandan Genocide meant: more than 50,000 Tutsis were killed every day, more than 2,000 every hour, and around 35 every minute. In total, in the period of one hundred consecutive days, roughly three-quarters of the Tutsi population in Rwanda lost their lives. Although the speed and brutality of the events in Rwanda may raise the presumption that this brutal incident came out of nowhere, as with other historically significant genocides, it is quite the opposite. The Rwanda case was primarily the result of a long-term multi-level crisis.
The start of the colonial administration of Rwanda at the end of the 19th century, decolonization in the 1950s, independence in the 1960s, a military coup in the 1970s, economic depression in the late 1980s, and above all the civil war at the onset of the nineties - plunged the country into a deep crisis. Crisis at the political, economic, and social levels. This paper aims to analyze the particular segments of the crisis in Rwanda from the end of the 19th to the end of the 20th century. Without the synergy of these specific segments, the genocide would not have been possible. First and foremost, this paper wants to point out that a possible consequence of a multi-crisis of a state may be genocide. Genocide is only one of the possible consequences of the crisis, on the one hand very exceptional, on the other hand absolutely the most brutal.