The prime minister of Rwanda Agathe Uwilingiyimana was brutally murdered in front of her family. She was at home when government soldiers overwhelmed the troops protecting her. In front of her family she was told to take off her clothes and spread her legs, she did both without argument. She was then stabbed in her vagina until the bayonets came through her neck. The prime minister’s husband and mother were also killed; her kids did manage to escape (Berry 14). “We were pretending to be dead. They took stones and smashed the heads of the bodies. They took little children and smashed their heads together. When they found somebody breathing, they pulled them out and finished them off…. They killed my family. I saw them kill my papa and my brother, but I did not see what happened to my mother.” --Valentina Iribagiza, a survivor of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda(Hentoff 36) “They took one person out of the group and cut off his head. And even the pregnant women, they cut open their stomachs…I saw my father being killed. They cut him to pieces --Placide Uwinagiye, another survivor of the holocaust in Rwanda (Hentoff 36)
These horrible acts could have been prevented. Two major players in the world knew well before hand of the
In the case of Rwanda that is exactly what the United Nations did not do. Before the killings started, Kofi Annan (then in charge of the United Nations peacekeeping mission and now secretary general of the UN) was told that the Hutus were piling up weapons and that the United Nations forces there in Rwanda could seize those weapons. Annan refused to give the order—although many lives could have been saved (Hentoff 34). Annan then did something even more baffling he ordered his man in Rwanda to share the information with the President of Rwanda Juvenal Habyarimana. But the president was the one who authorized the use of those very weapons to eliminate the Tutsis.
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