![]() Interviews in the first two groups were conducted through interpreters speaking French and Kinyarwanda. Interviews were conducted in the summer of 2000 with: approximately 30 inmates in Rwandan prisons who had already pleaded guilty to some form of participation in the genocide approximately 60 farmers living in rural Rwanda and conversations with various Rwandan academics, activists, and officials. This research is based a number of sources, including interviews and documentation. The station began broadcasting in late 1993, with range limited to the Kigali area from early 1994 onwards, its reach was more or less nationwide. As one imprisoned Hutu told me, “it's a lie if a farmer says he didn't listen to RTLM” (interview, July 8, 2000). Kirschke argues that “outside Kigali and other urban centres, the station is reported to have attracted people from urban backgrounds … rather than peasants from rural areas,” a claim which is not supported by the fieldwork undertaken for this essay. Although Tutsi were excluded from public life and faced harsh discrimination, there was little ethnic violence directed against them until the 1990 civil war between 19, tens of thousands of Tutsi were killed in a series of tightly focused and planned massacres. In 1973, President Grégoire Kayibanda's largely unsuccessful attempt to incite violence against Tutsi was the last card he played before being overthrown in coup by Juvénal Habyarimana, who remained president until his death in 1994. Before such violence subsided in 1967, up to 20,000 Tutsi were massacred and 300,000 were forced to flee (Prunier, 1995 Prunier G (1995) The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press), p 62), creating one of the first major refugee crises in Africa. The 1959 “Hutu revolution” was marked by violence aimed at driving out Tutsi chiefs after independence, monarchist Tutsi guerrillas attacked the new state from neighbouring countries, providing a pretext for pogroms against Tutsi in the country. It is important to interpret Rwanda's history of violence in non‐teleological terms. Though not without precedent in the region, unfortunately, given large‐scale massacres of Hutu in Burundi in the early 1970s and 1990s.
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