The next day, the extremist Hutu faction, largely under the auspices of the
Interahamwe (in Kinyarwandan it means "those who attack together"), a vicious squad of young Hutus, set out to eradicate the country of its minority Tutsi and Twa populations, as well as moderate Hutus.
* April 7, 1994--The Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) and the extremist
Interahamwe begin the systematic massacre of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
A woman named Maria was 70 when the
Interahamwe, the Hutu militia that led Rwanda's 1994 genocide and now number between 20,000 and 30,000 of the estimated 140,000 rebels in the DRC, came to her home.
On May 3, soldiers detained a member of Jehovah's Witnesses and accused him of being a part of the
Interahamwe political movement.
A new militia, the
Interahamwe, crazed with racism, was organized throughout the country.
Operation Turquoise, however, did something quite contrary to its mandate of neutrality; it allowed the Hum militias, known as the
Interahamwe, the defeated Forces Armees Rwandaises (FAR) units, (2) and their political leaders, along with masses of Rwandan Hum civilians, to escape across the border into the Congo virtually under French protection while the Rwandan Tutsi population received little relief from the ongoing genocide being perpetrated against them.
On January 11, 1994, the Canadian UN Force Commander in Kigali, Romeo Dallaire, sent a "most immediate" cable to UN headquarters in New York indicating that a top-level trainer of the
Interahamwe militia of the Mouvement revolutionnaire national pour le Developpement (MRND) came forward with information to the effect that he had trained 1,700 men, who were at that time scattered in groups of 40 throughout Kigali.
A youth wing of the governing party, the
Interahamwe, was organized to protect the politicians and their lands from the opposition youths and from the large numbers of squatters who had fled their impoverished hillsides.
The Hutu rebels, who call themselves the
Interahamwe ("those who kill together"), are remnants of an army involved in the infamous 1994 Rwandan genocide that left up to a million people dead.
To achieve this end, their plans included the promotion of hatred and ethnic violence; the use of the media to further division in the population along ethnic lines; the identification and the extermination of the enemy and its accomplices; the training of paramilitary groups such as the
interahamwe (8) to massacre Tutsi civilians; the distribution of weapons to civilians and paramilitary groups; the erection of roadblocks at which mass executions were later performed; and the preparation, publishing, and broadcasting of lists of "enemies" to be eliminated.
Although the young man belonged to the Hutu army, known as the
Interahamwe, he had vowed to protect the family.