Prewriting Assignment 3

The Belgians gave the Rwandan colonials cards according to their ethnicity. Although the Hutus and the Tutsis were very similar, the Belgians considered the Tutsis superior to the Hutus even though they were the minority. This is when the tension between the two began. Juvenal Habyarimana was the Hutu president of Rwanda leading up to 1994. The economy of Rwanda was very desperate. The Tutsi refugees in Uganda, supported by some moderate Hutus, were putting together the RPF, Rwanda Patriotic Front, to overthrow Juvenal Habyarimana take back the Rwandan land they believed they deserved. In April of 1994, Juvenal Habyarimana died when his plane was shot down. The Hutus immediately blamed the RPF leader, Paul Kagame. This began the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

In only one hundred days, eight hundred thousand Rwandans were killed. The radical Hutus were killing every Tutsi, or moderate Hutu they believed to be in support of the RPF, they could find. They even forced some Hutus to kill their neighboring Tutsis, threatening their own death if they did not comply. The Hutu forces collaborated in Kigali, so in July of 1994 when the RPF captured Kigali, the Hutu forces fell apart and a cease fire was declared. This ended the massacre, but not the struggle.

When the RPF seemed to have the victory, many Hutus fled to what is now the Dominican Republic of Congo. The government in Rwanda was initially led by a Hutu with Paul Kagame as his deputy, but the Hutu did not last long. He was put into jail for "inciting ethnic violence". To this day, Rwanda is led by Paul Kagame of the RPF and continue to struggle with the Kutus forces in the Dominican Republic of Congo. BBC News states that "The world's largest peacekeeping force has been unable to end the fighting".

The photograph "Sitting on Rail" was taken in Rwanda in 2001. The boy who took the photograph, Musa, would have been three years old at the time of the genocide. This struggle has been surrounding him, and the boys in the pictures, all of their lives. Despite the Tutsi and Hutu struggle, Rwanda has always struggled economically. For example, in June of 2006 David Kubaye wrote that they were just beginning to insert a sewage system.

From the information given at the site of the photograph, I know that Musa arrived at the orphanage in 1997. Knowing how the Rwandan past and Musa's personal past must be affecting him makes the gray sky in the photograph seem even more dooming. I originally thought this picture was taking to inspire sympathy, not understanding, and I think the background supports that even more. Musa must know that we cannot understand what he has been through, so he captures the picture not to inspire pity, as he does not show the faces, but to inspire sympathy. This sympathy should inspire people to help in Rwanda. If he was trying to have the viewers pity them, or feel guilty for the lack of help given to Rwanda, he would have shown the faces of the kids, and not had the vectors of attention directed away from the viewers and into the gray sky. In the photograph, he is showing the struggle that they face every day.

Work Cited

Kabuye, David. "Rwanda: today." Web log post. Rwandanstories. John Steward and David Fullerton, 2006. Web. 17 Feb. 2010. .

"Rwanda: How the Genocide Happened." BBC News. BBC MMX, 18 Dec. 2008. Web. 17 Feb. 2010. .