Blueprint of Nations
Welcome to 'Double Helix: Blueprint of Nations,' the podcast where we analyze and look at the events, people and actions that have shaped the nations of our world . From revolutions to treaties, conflicts to triumphs, we explore the historical blueprints that continue to influence the way nations think and act today.
Blueprint of Nations
The Rwandan Genocide: 100 Days (Part 5)
Rwanda descends into hell over the course of roughly 100 days. The machinery of violence, built over generations, reaches its horrific climax, unleashing a wave of brutality that defies comprehension. What makes the catastrophe even more devastating is its deeply personal nature—neighbors turn on neighbors, friends betray friends, and entire communities are torn apart. When the bloodshed finally ceases, the nation is left in ruins—shattered, haunted, and grasping for answers that may never fully come. The scars, both physical and psychological, will linger for generations, a painful reminder of how quickly humanity can unravel.
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This episode contains detailed descriptions of genocide, mass violence and human suffering. While these events must be understood, their reality is deeply distressing. Listener discretion is strongly advised. Kigali, april 6, 1994, 8.23 pm. The air hangs heavy with the scent of eucalyptus and wood smoke. If you were standing in Kigali that evening, you'd notice how ordinary everything seemed Children being called in for the night, their voices echoing off of the hills, shopkeepers pulling down their shutters, metal scraping against concrete in the RTLM studio, a technician queuing up another evening of music and talk shows. At a military checkpoint, the young soldier yawns, thinking about the end of his shift. These are the last normal moments. At 8.27 pm, in the dense darkness above Kigali, a surface-to-air missile streaks upwards. President Juvenal Javier Imanescu, returning from peace talks in Tanzania, begins his final descent towards Kigali International Airport. Inside he's discussing the recently signed peace accords with Burundi's president. Conversation will never finish. The plane erupts in flames. Wreckage rains down on the grounds of Javier Imana's own presidential compound. By 8.30 pm the phone lines across Kigali are alive with activity.
Speaker 1:Remember that machinery of genocide we've examined in our last episode the carefully maintained list, the trained militias, the stockpiled weapons. Now it shudders to life with terrifying efficiency. This is part five of our series on the Rwandan genocide 100 Days. You know how they say you can't understand someone until you walk a mile in their shoes. Well, I'd argue you can't understand a nation until you've walked through its history, not just the highlight reel or the sanitized version you find in textbooks. I mean really getting into its DNA, those defining moments that shaped everything that came after, those moments where paths were chosen, where decisions were made in palaces and backrooms and city streets that changed the course of millions of lives. I'm your host, paul, and this is Double Helix Blueprint of Nations, where we unravel the genetic code of countries through their most transformative moments. Think of it like ancestry testing, but for entire nations. We dig deep into the historical DNA, finding those crucial moments that made countries who they are today.
Speaker 1:The Presidential Guard moves first. They don't rush, they don't panic. They've rehearsed this. By 9.15 pm, colonel Telstine Bagazora Remember him from our last episode it's already implementing the plan. In the Presidential Guard headquarters. Remember him from our last episode. It's already implementing the plan. In the Presidential Guard headquarters, officers are opening sealed envelopes containing pre-prepared orders. The inter-highway leadership is being contacted through established channels. By 10.30pm, the first roadblocks appear in Kigali, not random barricades thrown up in chaos, but carefully planned checkpoints at strategic intersections. The men manning them are not angry mobs, they're organized units working from prepare list. They're checking ID cards, just as they've been trained to do.
Speaker 1:Midnight comes and RTLM begins broadcasting coded messages we discussed in our last episode. But there is a shift in the language. The hypothetical has become immediate. The graves is full becomes cut down to tall trees. Watch for cockroaches. Becomes clean your neighborhood. Let me take you to one of these first moments. We're in the Kimuhurura neighborhood.
Speaker 1:A group of presidential guard soldiers approaches the home of Agate Uwilingiimana, the moderate Hutu prime minister, who might have called for calm. The 10 Belgian UN peacekeepers assigned to protect her try to hold their position. They're not prepared for what happens next. The presidential guard doesn't just kill them, they torture them for hours. When their bodies are found later, the evidence of their suffering will be plain to see. This isn't just murder. It's a message to the international community Leave or share their fate. For her part, will and Guillimana is murder alongside her husband. All order breaks. A new provisional government headed by Bagasora and a military junta is put in charge of Rwanda, and a military junta is put in charge of Rwanda.
Speaker 1:Dawn breaks over Kigali on April 7. The roadblocks that appeared overnight are now fully manned. At each one, inter-hawaii militiamen check identity cards with practice efficiency. A survivor later recalled they had tables set up like a bureaucratic office. They would check your ID, consult their list and decide if you lived or died with the casualness of stamping a form. The inter-highway don't rampage, they process, they move house to house, checking names against their list. Opposition politicians, human right activists, journalists anyone who might resist was coming. Their bodies would be left in the streets as warning.
Speaker 1:By noon the radio waves carry new instructions. Rtln's familiar voices, which just yesterday were playing pop music, now read out addresses. The graves are only half full. They say there is work to be done at the following locations. Each announcement is a death sentence for the families living across those addresses. And so the machetes come out, not in chaos but in order. The Interahawai have trained for this. They know exactly how to cut to ensure their victims suffer before dying. They call it cutting down the tall trees. They work in shifts, they take lunch breaks. They hold team meetings to discuss their productivity.
Speaker 1:In the Gikondo district of Kigali, through a crack in her ceiling, a survivor watches as her community transforms. The man who had been my children's math teacher checked names off of a list. The woman who sold us bread each morning pointed out houses. The killing was not done by strangers. It was done by the people who knew us best. This is the terrible efficiency we've been building towards. In our previous episode, remember how we traced the creation of ethnic identity cards under Belgian rule. Now those same cards become death warrants. Remember how we examined the transformation of RTLM from a pop music station into a propaganda machine. Now it becomes a command center for genocide.
Speaker 1:At the École Technique Officielle in Kigali, 2,000 Tutsis have sought refuge, protected by Belgian UN peacekeepers, but on April 11th the Belgians receive orders to withdraw. The school's priest begged them to stay. You are condemning these people to death, he says. The Belgian commander responds we have our orders. Within hours of their departure, the Interhawe enter the school by sunset. The playground is carpeted with bodies.
Speaker 1:The most chilling aspect of these first 24 hours isn't the killing itself. It's the administrative precision with which it is conducted In government offices across Kigali. Civil servants process the paperwork of mass murder with the same efficiency they once processed parking tickets. A clerk later describes we use the same forms, the same filing system. We just change what we were recording, from births and marriages to deaths and property seizures. This isn't chaos. This isn't spontaneous violence. This is the execution of a plan we watched being constructed over our previous episodes. Every checkpoint, every broadcast, every killing team is performing its assigned role in a machinery that took years to build by April 8th. The killing radiates outwards from Kigali like a dark tide following Rwanda's administrative boundaries with terrible precision. But to understand how this machinery of death moves across the country's thousand hills, we need to watch it operate, at both macro and micro level. Let me take you to a morning meeting in the Gitarama Prefecture. Local officials are gathered around a mat, coffee cups in hand, discussing what they call their work schedule. They could be planning an agricultural project or a road maintenance program. Instead they're organizing mass murder. A former participant later testified we had quotas, sectors to clear, progress, reports to file. A former participant later testified.
Speaker 1:The transformation of ordinary people into killers happened with terrifying speed. Listen to this perpetrator describe his first murder. I had killed chickens, but never an animal. The stoutness of a man. The first person I finished off in a rush, not thinking anything of it, even though he was a neighbor quite close on the hill. I had taken the life of a neighbor At that fatal instant, the hill. I had taken the life of a neighbor. At that fatal instant I did not see him for what he had been before. I struck someone who was no longer either close or strange to me.
Speaker 1:Another killer describes his first act. First I cracked an old mama's skull with a club, but she was already lying almost dead on the ground, so I did not feel death at the end of my arm. I went home that evening without even thinking about it. Next day I cut down some alive and on their feet. It was a day of a massacre at the church, so a very special day. Because of the uproar, I remember I began to strike without seeing who it was taking potluck with the crowd, so to speak. Our legs were much hampered by the crush and our elbows kept bumping. At one point I saw a gush of blood begin before my eyes, soaking the skin and clothes of a person about to fall. Even in the dim light I saw it streaming down. I sensed it come from my machete. I looked at the blade and it was wet. I took fright and went my way along to get out, not looking at the person anymore. I found myself outside, anxious to go home. I had done enough. That person I had just struck it was a mama and I felt too sick, even in the poor light, to finish her off.
Speaker 1:Each morning, killing teams gathered on local football fields, the same fields where just days earlier they had played weekend matches together. Now these spaces became staging grounds for genocide. A survivor from Butairair described watching from hiding. They arrived at 8, like it was a normal workday. They had attendance lists. They divided into teams. Some complained about being assigned areas too far from their homes. It was like watching a terrible parody of a community football league.
Speaker 1:The machinery of death operated with terrible simplicity. The only regulation was to keep going till the end, maintain a satisfactory pace, spare no one and loot what we found, explained a former Interhauwe member. It was impossible to screw up At a roadblock. In Itarama, a former civil servant explained the system. We had tables set up. One person would check IDs, another would consult the list, a third would direct people to either the waiting area or the processing area. We used this euphemisms. We had forms to fill out. Property to be accounted for Even in genocide there was paperwork.
Speaker 1:The radio continued its deadly work, but now with increasingly explicit instructions. Rtln broadcaster Valerie Bemariki's voice flowed across the airwaves. The graves are only half full. Who will help us complete this task? In response, killing teams move with greater urgency. A survivor from Kibuya remembers they called it clearing the brush, but we knew what that meant. No-transcript. Now, remember, we've been talking about a certain institution which has been central to the story of Rwanda, that is the Catholic Church. Remember in episode 2 how we examined its role in solidifying ethnic divisions and then in episode 4, we talked about its complicity in fomenting the language of genocide. Well, now we'll see his final terrible transformation, april 10th 1994.
Speaker 1:The Niyamata Church stands against the morning sky 2,000 people huddled inside, believing in centuries of sanctuary tradition. A survivor, hidden in the ceiling beams, witnessed what happens next. The priest told us to gather inside. He said we would be safe. Then he left and locked the door. When the killers came, they had the keys. I watched them organize their work in the church courtyard. They took attendance like it was a parish meeting. They sharpened their machetes on the church steps.
Speaker 1:The killing became a perverse form of communion At the Entorama Church a survivor recalled. They killed the old first, then the men, then the women. They took breaks between groups sitting on the pews drinking banana beer. Some wore their Sunday clothes. They said prayers before beginning each new round of killing. The blood ran down the aisles where we used to walk to receive the Eucharist In the Mugunero Seven-Day Adventist Church and Hospital Complex.
Speaker 1:Dr Gerard Entakiruti-Mana, a respected physician and church elder, moved through the hospital wards what he lists A nurse who survived the scribes. He checked off names like he was doing his rounds. This one, he would say, and this one. Patients still had IVs in their arms when they were dragged out. Some begged them in the name of Jesus. He told them Jesus had died for Hutus, not for Tutsis.
Speaker 1:But perhaps the most chilling transformation happened in Rwanda's school. In Butare, a high school principal used his administrative skills to organize killing squads. A student who survived by hiding in the library ceiling describes. He divided the killers into groups like study sections. He gave them grades for efficiency. One day I heard him say your technique has improved, you are now an A-level. He was talking about how cleanly they could kill with a single machete stroke. He was talking about how cleanly they could kill with a single machete stroke.
Speaker 1:At Kigali's main hospital, doctors who had taken the Hippocratic Oath turned their medical knowledge to torture. A nurse who survives testifies. They would inject air into the patient's veins A slow, painful death. They kept medical records of how long each method took. They discussed their findings over coffee in the break room Like it was a research project. When they killed pregnant women, they would bet on the sex of the unborn child before cutting them open.
Speaker 1:The hills of Bicicero tell us a different story on this hundred days, one of both extraordinary courage and of its limits. For two months, while genocide consumed the rest of Rwanda, these hills became a last fortress of resistance. A survivor who lost seven children in the final assault describes those days. We fought with stones against men with guns. When they came up one side of the hill, we would roll rocks down on them. We used our cattle herding whistles to warn each other. Sometimes we would all shout together to make them think we were stronger than we were. In the end, we died standing rather than on our knees, but the machinery of genocide wouldn't tolerate such defiance.
Speaker 1:A former Inter-Ahawa commander, later interviewed in a refugee camp, described the systematic response. We have been embarrassed by these Tutsis with their rocks and sticks. So we approached it like a military operation. We divided the hill into sectors, we cut off their water sources. We studied their warning systems. When someone suggested using tear gas to drive them out of their caves, we tested it first on dogs to get the concentration right.
Speaker 1:The final assault came in June. A survivor, hidden in a tree, described what happened. They came with megaphones Calling us out by names, people they knew were hiding. Come out, we have orders to spare you now, they said, and some did come out. I watched them line up. These people asked them to show their ID cards one last time and they killed them slowly, making others watch. They were teaching us something about hope.
Speaker 1:In the midst of this resistance, the bureaucratic nature of genocide persisted. A local official who participated in the Bicicero operation kept detailed records June 17, sector 4 cleared, 157 eliminated. Special note resistance stronger than expected. Request additional resources. These documents included ammunition expenditure reports and equipment maintenance schedules. Now let me take you to another kind of resistance, the intimate kind that happened in private homes and hidden spaces.
Speaker 1:In Butare, a group of Hutu women created what they called a shopping network. A survivor explains they would go to market as usual, but their shopping baskets had false bottoms. They smuggled food to people hidden in ceiling spaces and pit latrines. One day a woman was caught. The interhauwe made her sit in her own market stall, still wearing her shopping apron, while they killed the family she had been feeding. They left her there for three days, forcing other market women to walk past her body. A lesson in consequences.
Speaker 1:Yet even as some resisted, the machinery of genocide adapted and evolved. When the mayor of one small commune refused to participate, the response was coldly efficient. A clerk describes the process. They didn't arrest him or kill him immediately. They made him sit at his desk and watch while they used his official stamps to authorize the killings. They made him sign the death warrants by the end of the day. He was stamping them himself by the end of the week. He was one of the most efficient organizers At the Hotel de Mille Collines, later known to the world as Hotel Rwanda.
Speaker 1:But forget the Hollywood version. The reality was far more complex and terrifying. A survivor who spent those hundred days in the hotel describes it. We became a kind of theater show for the international community. It could point to us and say see, we're helping. Meanwhile, we could hear the screams from just outside our walls. Every night we would count the sounds of machete blows, knowing each one meant another family gone. Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager whose story would later be romanticized, kept a diary during those days. Today they killed 67 people on my street, he wrote. Tomorrow they will kill more. And the world just watches television. But here's what the movie doesn't show you.
Speaker 1:Those phones worked because the same French government supporting the genocidaires wanted to maintain contact with their allies inside. The supplies arrived because UN peacekeepers, forbidden from intervening militarily, could still deliver water to the Europeans. Here's another document that captures this terrible dance of complicity and survival. A hotel receipt from May of 1994 shows room charges for secure accommodation payable in advance. Some survivors later testified that they had to pay for their rooms even as killers waited outside.
Speaker 1:We will talk more about Hotel Rwanda in our next episode. Suffice it to say the story is not as good as we have been led to believe. Story is not as good as we have been led to believe. But now we need to discuss something even darker the systematic use of rape as a weapon of genocide. In Kabgaji, the Interahaw established what they called rape houses. A survivor testified. They kept records of who they violated. They had shifts schedules. The same men who had been our neighbors, who had attended our weddings, now organized their atrocities like business meetings. One man apologized for being late to rape me. He said he had to finish his paperwork first.
Speaker 1:The systematic nature of sexual violence reached depths of depravity that challenged description, but we must speak of it. A doctor who treated survivors describes they would rape mothers in front of their children, daughters in front of their fathers. They would keep ledgers of the victims of their fathers. They would keep ledgers of the victims. Some women were assigned to specific militiamen. They called it ownership. These weren't crimes of opportunity, this was genocide expressed through sexual violence.
Speaker 1:Now let me take you to what might have been the most efficient killing of the entire genocide the technical school in Murambi. Over 45,000 people were killed in just two days. The school's classrooms were converted into killing chambers with assembly line precision. A survivor who escaped describes the systemic nature of the slaughter. They processed those classroom by classroom. We could hear them discussing their progress during breaks. Room 12 completed, they would say, moving on to room 13. They took attendance before killing began, checking names against the school's registration list. The bureaucratic precision was staggering. A clerk's ledger recovered from Murambi shows entries like April 21st, sector C, room 1-8, clear 11,403 processed Additional lime needed for disposal Teams rotating every four hours to maintain efficiency.
Speaker 1:A survivor hidden among the bodies for three days describes the methodical nature of the killing. They would bring in each group, about 60 people per classroom, make them sit down like it was a normal school day, take attendance, then the killing would begin. Between groups. They would take cigarette breaks, complain about being tired. I heard one killer say to another at this rate we'll miss the football match. They were discussing sports while standing in ankle-deep blood.
Speaker 1:As the RPF advanced towards Kigali, the machinery of genocide took on a frenzied quality. But even in this acceleration there was a system, a method to the madness. In late June 1994, a survivor hiding in the ceiling of a government office in Roamangana describes what she witnessed. The killing had become around the clock now. They worked on their car headlights at night. But what struck me most was how they still kept their ledgers, even as they could hear RPF gunfire in the distance. They would pause between killings to record property One refrigerator good condition, one television nearly new. They were planning their futures while destroying ours.
Speaker 1:The looting wasn't random pillaging, it was systematic theft on a massive scale. A former local official now in prison, describes this process. We had committees for property distribution, better furniture went to higher-ranking officials, livestock was divided by quota. One day I watched two killers nearly murder each other over who would get a dead family's coffee plantation. They stopped arguing only when someone reminded them that they were still living Tutsis to find John Batiste. One of the former killers captures this grotesque marriage of murder and materialism. If the RPF had not taken over the country and put us to flight, we would have killed each other after the death of the last Tutsi. That is how hooked we were on the madness of dividing up their land. We were like addicts, but our drug was other people's property.
Speaker 1:But as the RPF advanced, its methodical destruction gave way to something even more horrific. A survivor in Ramagana recalls they stopped taking breaks. They stopped holding meetings. They killed through the night using headlights. They were like people trying to finish a job before a deadline and in a way they were. The machinery began to break down, but not in a way that brought mercy A witness from Gitarama. In the beginning they had lists, procedures. By the end they were killing anyone they could find. A killer told me, if we cannot finish the work, we must at least make it impossible to rebuild, even in flight.
Speaker 1:The Interahawain maintained their grotesque bureaucracy At the Resumu Falls border crossing as hundreds of thousands fled into Zaire, they set up one final set of checkpoints. A witness describes they were still checking IDs, still consulting their list. Even as they ran they couldn't abandon their bureaucratic habits. They killed people right there at the border, threw the bodies into the river. They wanted to complete their work until the very end. A survivor who watched the exodus from hiding captures this surreal scene. They carried their machetes with them into exile. Some had looted furniture balanced on their heads. They had photo albums, kitchen pots, everything they could carry and their weapons. They were taking their normal lives with them and the tools of genocide were just part of those lives.
Speaker 1:Now, early July 1994. Kigali has become a city of ghosts and guard posts. Paul Rusesabagina, still keeping his diary at the Hotel de Mil Collines, writes the streets are empty except for dogs and bodies. The killers have fled, but their work remains everywhere we look. They turned our capital into a graveyard and called it progress. Let me take you to a moment that captures this terrible transition. We're in a government office in central Kigali. The intra-hawe are preparing to flee. But watch what they're doing. They're shredding documents, but not before making copies. A clerk later testifies. They said we would need the records when we returned to finish our work.
Speaker 1:The RPF advance brought its own kind of methodical progression. A survivor hiding in the ceilings of a church in Kigali describes these final days. We could hear the battle getting closer. The killers became more frantic. What I remember most was their organization. Even at the end they had meetings about how to retreat efficiently. They discussed which records to take, which to burn. One man said we must preserve our filing systems for when we return.
Speaker 1:As the genocidaires fled, they took not just the weapons and the loot, but the administrative infrastructure of death. They took not just the weapons and the loot, but the administrative infrastructure of death. A UN observer who entered Kigali in those final days found something chilling. In one government office I found a calendar still on April's page. Next to it was a ledger with columns for daily quotas and property acquisitions. The last entry was eerily bureaucratic Operations suspended due to tactical withdrawal, all materials properly inventoried.
Speaker 1:In one of the last RTLN broadcasts. As RPF forces approached their station, a presenter offered a chilling summary of what we were witnessing. We may not have finished the work, but we have shown people what is possible. We have taught a lesson that will not be forgotten. The machinery of genocide may have been stopped, but its architects were proud of what they had created.
Speaker 1:And so here's one final scene. It is now August 1994. A small village outside of Gitarama, a young woman returns to what was once her home. The hills are still green, the rain still falls, but nothing else is the same. Standing in the doorway of her empty house, she finds that calendar on the wall, still turned to April 100 days Frozen in time. 100 days frozen in time.
Speaker 1:A UN observer, arriving in late July, wrote something that still haunts me. It's not just the dead we must count, it's the living who must somehow continue. The children who watched their parents die, the mothers who couldn't save their children, the neighbors who now know exactly what their neighbors were capable of. The world that existed before these hundred days is gone. The world that will emerge after them is yet to be born.
Speaker 1:In the space between, rwanda holds his breath, counting his death and facing questions that have no easy answers. How do you rebuild a nation whose social fabric has been so completely torn apart? How do you create justice from such a comprehensive injustice? How do you prevent the machinery of death from ever being reassembled? Machinery of death from ever being reassembled Next time. On Double Helix, while Rwanda burned, the world didn't just watch. It actively looked away. We'll step into the corridors of power where decisions to abandon Rwanda were made with diplomatic precision From the Élysée Palace in Paris, where French officials coordinated military support for the genocidaires, to the United Nations in New York, where bureaucrats deliberately avoided using the word genocide. We'll witness how international powers became complicit in mass murder through their calculated indifference. Join us in our next episode, where we'll discover that sometimes the greatest crime isn't pulling the trigger but choosing to stand aside while knowing exactly what will happen next. Until then, thank you for listening. We will see you soon. Thank you.
