The Rwandan Genocide was the organized murder of up to one million Rwandans in 1994. It is commonly portrayed as an eruption of ethnic conflict in which militias of the Hutu ethnic majority, with the connivance of the Hutu-dominated government, attempted to carry out an ethnic cleansing of the minority Tutsis, and of Hutu moderates who opposed the genocide.
The United Nations declined to take positive action.
The genocide ended when a Tutsi Rwandese Patriotic Army invaded from neighboring Uganda, and a Tutsi-led government took power. In the aftermath of the genocide, hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees fled into eastern Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
For further reading see: