Genocide by Attrition 39 Over the course of the next 100 days, perhaps as many as one-quarter of the Hutu majority participated in the mass and often extremely brutal killing of Tutsi.65 Most killings were carried out by hand with machetes or clubs.66 There were also staggeringly high incidents of rape of women and girls.67 When the invading RPF ended the genocide in July, an estimated 72 percent, approximately 800,000 people, of Rwanda’s Tutsi population lay dead.68 Some 63,000 Tutsi fled the genocide to neighboring Burundi, while another 500,000 crossed into Tanzania.69 Large numbers of these refugees began to return to the country after the RPF consolidated control in Rwanda, which prompted more than one million Hutu, fearing retributive genocidal violence by Tutsi, to seek safety either in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) or Burundi.70 The 1994 genocide in Rwanda was not an isolated event. Nor did the 1994 genocide preclude future violence. Since independence, Tutsi have faced massacres resulting in mass refugee flows out of the country.71 Such violence continued through 2000, and the fighting played a major role in sustaining multiple armed conflicts throughout Africa’s Great Lakes Region, most notably the Democratic Republic of Congo, where as many as 5.4 million conflict-related deaths occurred between 1998 and 2002.72 Explanations for the repeated outbreaks of mass violence, including the 1994 genocide, typically emphasize the critical importance of ethnic difference, expressed in racialized terms, to the exclusion of other contributing factors.73 National identification cards, a by-product of colonial rule, played an important role in the process of institutionalizing prejudice and creating and radicalizing hatred over time. The origin of the “Hutu” and “Tutsi” distinction is still disputed. Some scholars argue that the ethnonyms originally referred to occupational categories: Hutus as farmers and Tutsis as herders.74 Others assert that the terms reflected political divisions, as Tutsis controlled most of the positions of power before and during the colonial period.75 However, there is widespread agreement that the 65 One estimate puts the figure at between 25 to 30 percent. Allette Smeulers and Lotte Hoex, “Studying the Microdynamics of the Rwandan Genocide,” The British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 50, No. 3, 2010, p. 436. 66 Ibid. 67 U.N., “Outreach Programme on the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda and the United Nations, Supporting Survivors,” website, https://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/supporting-survivors.shtml. 68 Smeulers and Hoex “Studying the Micro-dynamics of the Rwandan Genocide,” p. 436. The total number of Tutsi killed remains in debate. However, according to some calculations, 333.3 killings took place per hour, or 5.5 per minute, throughout the country for the duration of the genocide. Hollie Nyseth Brehem, “Subnational Determinants of Killing in Rwanda, Criminology, Vol. 55, No. 1, 2017, p. 5. 69 Center for Disease Control, “Morbidity and Mortality Surveillance in Rwandan Refugees–Burundi and Zaire, 1994,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, February 9, 1996, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00040202.htm. 70 Ibid. 71 Deborah Mayersen, “‘Deep Cleavages that Divide’: The Origins and Development of Ethnic Violence in Rwanda,” Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2012, pp. 10-11. Hutu-Tutsi violence in neighboring Burundi also produced tens of thousands of Tutsi deaths and large out-flows of refugees in 1972, 1988, and between 1991 to 1992. Peter Uvin, “Ethnicity and Power in Burundi and Rwanda: Different Paths to Mass Violence,” Comparative Politics, Vol. 31, No. 3, 1999, pp. 58-59. 72 International Rescue Committee, “Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: An Ongoing Crisis,” May 1, 2007, https://www.rescue.org/report/mortality-democratic-republic-congo-ongoing-crisis, p. ii. 73 Overpopulation is also pointed to as another contributing factor to explain the repeated outbreaks of violence in Rwanda. High rural population densities driving increasingly fierce socio-economic competition for limited agricultural land in a mountainous country where hunger and malnutrition is commonplace and famines relatively frequent can lead to heightened tensions. Paul Magnarella, “Explaining Rwanda’s 1994 Genocide,” Human Rights & Human Welfare, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2002, p. 34. North-South regional tensions among Hutu over political representation and economic affairs was a significant issue as well. André Guichaoua, From War to Genocide: Criminal Politics in Rwanda, 1990-1994, trans. Don Webster (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), p. 4. 74 Timothy Longman, “Identity Cards, Ethnic Self-Perception, and Genocide in Rwanda,” Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, eds., Jane Caplan and John Torpey, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 350. 75 Ibid.