Seven years after one of the worst genocides of the 20th century, Rwanda has barely begun to recover. The spectacle of half a million people wiped from the face of the earth has forever stained the lives of every Rwandan man, woman and child.
Of Rwanda's estimated 8.2 million citizens at the start of the genocide, at least five hundred thousand were gone in just one hundred days. This is equivalent to about one every 17 seconds, or roughly one of every 16 human beings.
Rwanda's genocide began on April 6, 1994, after a missile fired from the swamps near Kigali's airport downed the plane of President JUVENAL HABI-ARI-MANA, a Hutu who had negotiated a power-sharing agreement with Tutsi rebels, enraging Hutu extremists. Within hours, Hutu radio blamed the assassination on Tutsis and encouraged the populace to wipe out the "cockroaches" - their term for Tutsis.
In Kibuye, a Rwandan town, anti-Tutsi sentiment slowly rose to the surface. Kibuye historically had one Rwanda's highest concentrations of Tutsis, because the land is better suited for herding cattle, the traditional Tutsi occupation. Before the genocide, there were two hundred and fifty thousand Tutsis in Kibuye. Now, only about 8,000 remain. They know who did the killing. .
The 1948 UDHR came out of a particular period of time - after World War II, which spanned from 1939 to 1945. The devastating effects of the war had seen millions of soldiers and civilians killed, or maimed. The world became even more horrified after the Nazi soldiers on trial claimed their actions were justified because they were merely following orders. In 1945 with a dream of securing peace and justice in the world by international co-operation, the United Nations was created.
By 1948 those nations of the world who were part of the United Nations adopted a document that would for the first time set out a series of fundamental human rights for everybody.
