Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

RWANDA Rwanda: Genocide or Civil War? The current state of affairs in Rwanda constitutes a catastrophe that never should have happened. Unfortunately, it has happened, but do the conditions and outcomes warrant using the term genocide? Based on facts about the ethnic make up of Rwanda, there is abundant proof that this is actually a case of violent, ongoing civil wars, and the use of the term genocide is not justified. The major crime problem in Rwanda since 1994 has been mass murder, officially know as genocide, which has been prevalent in this country in the mist of years of civil war. Genocide is defined as the methodically planned eradication of a racial, political, or cultural group. The United Nations (1998) has declared in the Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide of 1946, that genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group… (p. 1). Genocide represents a horror so special that the term has previously been used to described only two events in the twentieth century: the massacre of Armenians by Turks in 1915, in addition to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. The United Nations (1998