Research a country which is or was at war or in some form of turmoil. Imagine you are a reporter on location writing a piece about the struggle, Start with "Imagine living ..."

Rwandan Genocide Tears Apart Country

Imagine living in Gisenyi, Rwanda on April 6, 1994.  The day starts like so many others. People are going about their business in the market, doing their washing, listening to the radio, and eating bugali, a type of porridge.  The atmosphere seems peaceful, but scratch the surface and you feel a tension in the air.

Hutu residents gather together in the streets, at the market.  They carry machetes and constantly talk about the Tutsi "cockroaches" who are destroying their way of life. The military has set up checkpoints throughout the city and at the border to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to check all National Identity Cards and stop all Tutsi from leaving the country.

By the evening, people were listening to Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines, or the RTLMC.  At 8 PM the station announced that President Juvénal Habyarimana's plane had been shot down killing all on board.  Forty-five minutes later extreme violence erupted all over Rwanda.

It appears that the first victims of the violence were moderate Hutu politicians who would have used their influence to stop the violence.  In Gisenyi, Hutu turned against their Tutsi neighbors, hunting them down and in many cases slaughtering them in the most horrific and torturous ways.  Women were raped and killed, all were thrown into mass graves, all the while the voices of broadcasters on the transistor radios sang and called for more Tutsi blood.

Four years ago, when the pro-Hutu newspaper, Kangura, published President Juvénal Habyarimana's "Hutu Ten Commandments", calling for complete marginalization of the Tutsi. These commandments authorized violence and segregation of the Tutsi, a minority consisting of 15% of the entire population even specifically stating "the Hutu should stop having mercy on the Tutsi" among other things.  A year ago, Gisenyi Hutu murdered 1,005 Tutsi in a massacre which seems to have foretold this genocide. 

Picture from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-26875506