Former President Olusegun Obasanjo, in his open letter to President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday, expressed his fears about Nigeria should the country fail to find an effective solution to the current security challenges facing it.
Obasanjo said he is “deeply worried about four avoidable calamities” among which is possible attacks on the Fulani having been “rightly or wrongly” perceived as perpetrators of criminal activities all over the country including banditry, kidnapping, armed robbery and killings.
The former president said his concerns include “spontaneous or planned reprisal attacks against Fulanis which may inadvertently or advertently mushroom into pogrom or Rwanda-type genocide that we did not believe could happen and yet it happened”.
Also Read: signs of Rwanda
This is why it is pertinent to highlight the following 10 key points about Rwandan 1994 Genocide for the benefit of all concerned Nigerians, whom Obasanjo described as “all right-thinking Nigerians and those resident in Nigeria”.
1. The Rwandan Genocide was a genocidal mass slaughter of the people of the Tutsi and moderate Hutus in the country which started from April 7 and spanned through July 15, 1994. The Hutus, who were the majority of Rwandans, were targeting the people of minority Tutsi community in the country as well as their political opponents, regardless of their ethnic origin.
2. Within the 100 days of the killing spree, it was estimated that 800,000 Rwandans were killed, accounting for about 20 percent of the country’s total population and 70 percent of the Tutsi then living in Rwanda.
3. On the eve of April 7, 1994, a plane carrying the then-Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and his Burundi counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down, killing everyone on board while the plane was about to land in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.
4. The genocidal killings started the following day as Hutu extremists began a campaign of mass slaughter. Soldiers, police and militias set up checkpoints and roadblocks to slaughter Tutsis by demanding for people’s national identity cards which at the time had citizens’ ethnic group on them.
5. Although these killings started by detonating grenades and shooting of guns, they were largely done by machetes which most Rwandans kept around their houses. It was reported that Rwanda imported about $750,000 worth of machetes into the country from China a year earlier.
6. The number of rape victims recorded in the course of the mass murder ranged from 250,000 to 500,000 women, leading to the birth of about 20,000 children from these women with an estimate of more than 67 percent of the rape victims counted to have been infected with HIV.
7. The media was used to play a major role as local radio stations and newspaper outlets were set up to circulate propaganda stories and broadcast reports, urging people to “weed out the cockroaches”, meaning kill the Tutsis.
8. About 200,000 people participated in the perpetration of the genocide. The murderers were incentivised in the form of money, food, or land, to kill their Tutsi neighbours.
9. Tens of thousands of Tutsis who made attempts to escape the horrific killings by running to churches, hospitals, schools, and government offices were murdered in cold blood in the genocide. These places were known by Rwandans as places of refuge. It was worrisome that the Hutu extremists did not allow the corpses of Tutsis to be buried, leaving their bodies where they were killed and allowing animals to feed on them.
10. The Rwandan Genocide ended after the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a trained military group consisting of Tutsis, who had been exiled in earlier years to Uganda with the support of Uganda’s army, took over the country by entering Kigali.
Owing to the fear of attacks, about 2 million Hutus, including the civilians and some of those involved in the genocide, fled across the border into the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Tanzania. The RPF gained full control of the country and towards mid-July 1994, the genocide ended.
OLUWASEGUN OLAKOYENIKAN
