Years of cultivated hatred led to death on a horrifying scale.

By Kennedy Ndahiro (Editor of The New Times) @ TheAtlantic.com, April 13

[....] the dehumanization had started long before RTLM urged its listeners to “exterminate the cockroaches.” The killings in 1994 were a culmination of decades of hate-mongering, the indoctrination that began even before independence.

In 1959, Joseph Habyarimana Gitera, a leader of the radical Hutu political party Aprosoma, openly called for the elimination of the Tutsi “vermin.” The stigmatization and dehumanization of the Tutsi had begun. When the first of the many anti-Tutsi pogroms broke out that year, Gitera was overjoyed.

Over the years, whenever a sitting government ran into political trouble, it always played the Tutsi card to rally its supporters. Anti-Tutsi incitement came to the fore in November 1992, when an official in the ruling party, Léon Mugesera, openly called for the mass killings of Tutsis and for their bodies to be dumped in a river.

By the mid-1990s, the Hutu leadership was in jeopardy [....]