I. Identity Documents and Genocide: Case Studies 38 However, none of the atrocities committed against the Jewish people by the Nazis would have been logistically feasible on a rapid and mass scale without the initial definition and registration of the Jews. Horrifically, it was Jewish communities, under threat of violence by the Nazi regime, who compiled these very lists. The data collection process, in turn, made it possible to successively strip the Jewish people of their citizenship rights, expropriate their property, spatially restrict them to ghettos and camps, and, then finally, murder two-thirds of all Jews in the European territories controlled by the Nazis and their allies.58 Rwandan Genocide of the Tutsi People “Witness AEU, a Tutsi woman, who went to great lengths to secure a Hutu identity card in 1979, found that in 1994 this Hutu identity card saved her life. Four times she was taken to the edge of a hole that had been dug for bodies, some killed while others were buried alive. When she was about to be killed and thrown in this hole herself, her would-be killers looked at her identity card, which stated she was a Hutu, and let her live.” - International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Prosecutor v. Ferdinand Nahimana, JeanBosco Barayagwiza, Hassan Ngeze59 “Witness AWX statement to the Tribunal [describes] him telling Interhamwe [a Hutu paramilitary organization] to flush out the Inyenzi [‘cockroaches,’ a derogatory term for Tutsis] . . . ‘To get out of the vehicle’ and ‘get to work’ meaning to kill the Tutsis, whereupon the Interhamwe ‘would start checking identity cards and the killings would start.’” - International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Prosecutor v. Tharcisse Renzaho60 “Witness KBZ, a Tutsi, [was] stopped at a roadblock. She and about four other Tutsi women who did not have identity cards were separated and taken to outside the home of the Kimihuruna conseiller [an official of a neighborhood in the Rwandan capital of Kigali] . . . Two Interhamwe raped her behind the church after she was unable to produce an identification card upon her arrival. No one intervened.” - International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Prosecutor v. Tharcisse Renzaho61 The assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda on April 6, 1994 triggered the genocide that immediately followed. The country’s state-sponsored radio station, Radio Télévision Libre Mille Collines, immediately accused the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi-led rebel group, of shooting down President Habyarimana’s plane as it approached Kigali International Airport for landing.62 The station’s announcers then called on all Hutu “patriots” to kill Tutsi, the minority group that constituted approximately 14 percent of the country’s 7.9 million people.63 “You have missed some enemies [Tutsi],” an announcer demanded in one infamous radio broadcast at the start of the Rwandan genocide. “You must go back there and finish them off. The graves are not yet full!”64 58 Raoul Hillberg, The Destruction of European Jews, (Teaneck: Holmes & Meie, 1985); U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Remaining Jewish Population of Europe in 1945,” website, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/ remaining-jewish-population-of-europe-in-1945. 59 Prosecutor v. Ferdinand Nahimana, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, Hassan Ngeze, ICTR, Case No. ICTR-99-52-T, Judgment and Sentence (Trial), December 3, 2003, para. 119. 60 Prosecutor v. Tharcisse Renzaho, ICTR, Case No. ICTR-97-31-T, Judgment (Trial), July 14, 2009, p. 189, fn. 802. 61 Id. at p. 179, para. 690 and 691. 62 The Prosecutor vs. Jean-Paul Akayesu, ICTR, Case No. ICTR-96-4-T, Judgement (Trial), September 2, 1998, para. 123. U.N., “Outreach Programme on the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda and the United Nations,” website, https://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/historical-background.shtml#:~:text=By%201994%2C%20 Rwanda%27s%20population%20stood,and%20the%20Twa%20(1%25). 63 Ibid. Details regarding the very small third ethnic group, Twa, are not included in the discussion. 64 Bill Berkeley, The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe, and Power in the Heart of Africa (New York: New Republic Book, 2001).