Remembering the Rwandan genocide 30 years on – how did it happen?
Al Jazeera
Local media, in particular, were crucial in aiding the mass killings while world media ignored or underplayed them.
It has been three decades since the April 1994 Rwandan genocide when members of the majority Hutu ethnic group killed an estimated 800,000 minority Tutsis, moderate Hutus and members of a third ethnic group, the Twa, in one of the darkest episodes in world history.
A combination of colonial-era favouritism towards the Tutsis that angered other groups, a media landscape that was ripe for spreading hate and the slowness of the international community to respond to the crisis all combined to fuel the genocide.
The killings have continued to reverberate in East Africa, leading to civil wars and ongoing violence in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Here is how it unfolded:
