I've just watched the movie 'Hotel Rwanda' and I'm wondering, how is it possible that the Hutu's had no problem at all with killing all those Tutsi's? Was it their culture to just kill everyone that seemed as an enemy for them or did the Tutsi's really ruined the lives of the Hutu's who where alive at that moment?
Bumping this, I watched this back in High School and would like more information as well.
It's important to understand that the Rwandan Genocide took place in the after math of a civil war between the Hutu government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front who were majority Tutsi. It should be noted the RPF were not a mono-ethnic army, many anti government Hutus joined their ranks, but the Hutu Power propaganda broadcast the idea that the RPF was a Tutsi army and that all Rwandan Tutsis were RPF sympathizers and potential traitors.
After the peace treaty had ended the civil war and divided the country between the government forces and the RPF many former government soldiers started training young men in militias, in preparation for the war to resume. They also began collecting records on where The Tutsis lived in their communities, Remember they considered them all potential enemy combatants. When President Habyarimana was assassinated the militias saw this as the re-ignition of the civil war. They killed all the moderate Hutus in the interim government they could get their hands on, ensuring extremist hardliners who would continue the fight against the RPF would take control. Then they went about their ethnic cleansing.
As for why the Hutus and Tutsis were so divided is a bit of a history lesson but more recent than one might think. Hutu and Tutsi were originally class distinctions, with some mobility in between them: Hutus were the majority sustenance farmers, and Tutsis were the aristocrats and cattle herders. When Belgium established a colony in Rwanda they saw the class distinction as an ethnic one and prevented intermarriage making it stick. They also used the Tutsis as their local administrators, so a lot of the colonial fustrations of Rwandans before and after their independence was projected onto the Tutsis. Of course by the 1990s Rwanda had been ruled by the Hutu majority for decades with the Tutsis a generation or more away from a time they had political power. But hey, its not like racism ever was logically consistent.