Brooks Gentry, one of Professor Birdsong’s Refugee and Asylum students graduated from Barry Law in December of 2011. Mr. Gentry had travelled to Rwanda in the past and wrote a very interesting paper on Rwanda’s genocide refugees. He has given me permission to publish it here on my blog. Read and learn.
RWANDA’S GENOCIDE REFUGEES
AND INVOCATION OF
THE 1951 REFUGEE CONVENTION’S
SECTION C’S CESSATION CLAUSE
Brooks N. Gentry[1]
I. INTRODUCTION
Rwanda is a small, beautiful country in Central/East Africa, surrounded by the very large Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to the west, Tanzania to the east, similarly small Burundi on the southeast and popular Uganda to the northeast.[2] Sporting the stunning lake views and beautiful beaches of Lake Kivu, along with the worlds best Gorilla Trekking in Volcans National Park, Rwanda is a world traveler’s destination.[3] As spectacular as its scenery, Rwanda, however, also has a dark side.
According to the United States Central Intelligence Agency, Rwanda was almost independent from Belgium when, in 1959, the then King, a Tutsi, was overthrown by the majority ethnic group, the Hutus.[4] For years thousands of Tutsi were killed and driven into nearby countries, particularly those named above.[5] A generation later, in the 1980’s, the children of these Rwanda exiles formed a rebel group known as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).[6] The RPF, the Tutsi children of parents who had been driven out of their homeland Rwanda, began a civil war in Rwanda in 1990 between the Hutus and the Tutsi’s resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths.[7] Finally, in 1994 a state orchestrated mass genocide occurred in which Rwandan citizens killed one another, often family members and neighbors killing those they had known their entire lives.[8] Later in 1994 the RPF took control of the Hutu militias and the genocide ceased, while as many as two million Hutu refugees fled Rwanda, many afraid of Tutsi retribution upon Hutus who remained home.[9]
Of these almost two million refugees, most have returned home.[10] However, some have not. For those who have not left their current host country, many reasons keep them there; fear of persecution upon returning to Rwanda among them.[11] Until